Projects

Tiger Helix (Oblivion) is a 3-day micro residency at Towner as part of an ongoing project by artist Sophie Chapman. In expansive installation and playful performance it explores wild and queer ways to change and get free in the face of polycrisis*

Its origins lie in a single image that surfaced for the artist during a lockdown therapy session. When asked to close her eyes and imagine what freedom means to her, Sophie saw a shimmering, pulsing double helix made of tiger-print spandex, with hands reaching out from inside its coils. This tiger helix has since become an obsession and a structure for Sophie to think about freedom as queer, cyclical, embodied, and always in process. 

Through physical movement, installation and mark-making, this performance wraps in references to the artist's relationship with nature whilst living in a city, research into spiralism in nature, non-linear time and the pseudo-science morphic resonance theory. This is a collective experiment in what the tiger helix could tell us about how change is experienced around us by both humans and non-humans.

Morph suits are a central tool: worn in performance, they allow participants to blur boundaries between human and animal, slipping the grids of gender and species into something animorphic, cartoonish, and playful. The therapeutic beginnings of tiger helix - reaching inside yourself to reach out to others, finding queer forms of freedom amidst disaster - remains central to the process.

At its heart, Tiger Helix (Oblivion) is a practice of collective improvisation - creating temporary, playful ecosystems where images, gestures, sounds, and collaboration ripple between bodies. Allowing space for self-consciousness and release, following curiosity and instinct, to discover what emerges without preconception. It is a queer ecological world-building - funny, affective, unstable, permeable, and always unfinished.

*Popularized by historian Adam Tooze, polycrisis describes a “modern, interconnected era where multiple, complex risks reinforce one another, creating profound uncertainty and making challenges difficult to manage in isolation”. 

Sophie Chapman is an interdisciplinary artist and organiser working across experimental processes, performance, drawing, video, music, and writing. Her work explores phenomena that feel slippery or difficult to articulate - imagination, states of dissociation, collective sensation, transformation - which she approaches through embodied experimentation and improvisation.

Sophie works in oscillation between playful solo study and live, collective testing. A drawing becomes a score, a score becomes a performance, a performance becomes a video or installation and back again. Material is co-produced with others, chopped, layered, and reassembled. She is deeply obsessed with what can happen when people make things together. Collaboration is the condition through which her work becomes alive and she wants to make art that is as strange as aliveness is.

Sophie has shared work at Strange Exchange Glasgow, the Women’s Art Library Goldsmiths, Supernormal Festival, Kunsthall Ghent, IMT Gallery London and Eastside Projects Birmingham. She runs the experimental sharing night MINCE and the queer liberation ensemble F*Choir. 

A 2 hour event involving performance and discussion which visitors are invited to observe or, through booking, participate in.

Join us for an afternoon of collective play, movement, and improvisation as part of Sophie Chapman's project Tiger Helix (Oblivion). You're welcome to come and watch, or to step in and take part. This is a work-in-progress sharing of installation works, performance and prompts.

Inspired by spirals in nature, queer ecologies, and the strange science of morphic resonance, this session invites participants to move together, follow curiosity, and see what emerges when bodies share a space without a script. Morph suits will be available to wear - blurring the lines between human, creature, and shimmer - but you can equally take part in your own clothes, or simply watch the world unfold from the sides.

[booking link]

Images: Tiger Helix (Oblivion) presented as part of the London Conference of Critical Thought stream 'Art & Architecture: Planetary & Apocalyptic Spaces' 2023. Performers: Zanni CT, Moa Johansson and Samra Mayanja. Photos courtesy the artist.