Jade Blackstock explores tensions between inner and outer worlds through live performance, using the body, materiality, and environment as sites of inquiry. Rooted in Black diasporic contexts, she investigates how historical and cultural movements shape these relationships, focusing on ancestral traditions, myths, and materials that trace and challenge colonial and extractive systems. Her work considers race, feminism, displacement, class, and loss, with materials such as molasses, indigo, and tree branches recurring as co‑performers. Jade earned a BA in Fine Art Practice and Psychology from the University of Worcester and an MA in Contemporary Art Practice: Performance from the Royal College of Art. Her work has been shown internationally.
During the residency, Jade researched tactile repetitive movement, working with clay, charcoal and gauze. At the time, reading Kathryn Yussoff’s ‘A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None’, she treated clay as a fragment of the sub-terrain explored through the body. Stepping into kilos of clay and pressing it into the floor with her feet, she investigated how material encounters guide the body’s movement. Jade looked at deconstructed movement sequences, mark-making and traces, including the behaviour of moving materials such as charcoal carried by water along lengths of gauze as part of a larger investigation into process, embodiment and material histories.
Jade Blackstock completed a Lab residency in 2022.
