Victoria Kent Gray is an artist and practice-led researcher, and has presented work nationally and internationally throughout the UK, Europe, USA and Canada.
With an initial conservatoire training in dance and somatic practice (1998 – 2004), her primary medium and material is the body. Her work has expanded to include actions, interventions, time-based sculpture and video, being presented in museums, galleries, and festivals in performance art, fine art and, choreographic contexts.
Since 2011, she has drawn on Body-Mind Centering as a methodology for performing the body inside-out; in this sense, the works have become “performed somatizations.” Often durational, the performance’s utilise slowness and stillness, in conjunction with performing unsighted, bringing a cellular-attention to kinesthetic sensations. The work aims to bring dormant traumatic memory to consciousness, specifically, that which subsists at the sentient level of the bones, muscles, organs, fluids, glands and nerves. This cellular-attention aims to disturb “common-sense” hierarchies of sensory organisation, activating the political potential of a body that is intimately attuned to affective experience.
Recent presentations include; FADO Performance Art Centre (Toronto, Canada), VIVA Art Action (Montréal, Canada), 5th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art (Greece), The Tetley Centre for Contemporary Art & Learning (Leeds), Yorkshire Sculpture Park (Wakefield), Baltic 39 (Newcastle Upon Tyne), Royal Museums Greenwich (London), Siobhan Davies Studios (London), 8th Biennial of Photography (Poznan, Poland), Grace Exhibition Space (New York), and, Centre de Cultura de Dones Francesca Bonnemaison (Barcelona).
Currently she is a PhD candidate at Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts, London. Her thesis integrates affect studies, process philosophy, political theory, and somatics.