As an attempt to restore lost body-to-body intimacies, Tending Distances present two feminist voices in prioritising care as practice. Shin and Lane lean on clay and paper bodies to make through intimate touch, stillness and letter-writing. Tending Distances hope to revalue and centre feminist notions of care and nurture beyond art and into community practices.

Shin invited participants to pause from the routine of rapidly changing living conditions. Beheld, Bestilled is an expanding archive, documenting traces of restored touch and rest in a post-social isolation period. Residuals of bodies and conversations are encased in clay objects through an exchange of heat, moisture, oils and skin cells by participants. Clay holds them in a tight, calming embrace.

In Sophie Lane’s practice, she destructs letters written to loved ones, which are then transformed into paper pulp to create new sheets of paper. These objects embody cathartic writing and meditative art processes, which condense the emotional impact of isolation practices in a global pandemic crisis. Unread and unsent, these letters are stripped of all personal narrative and given a new opportunity to be a further tool of compassion.