“Engaging…whimsical…memorable. This performance was over way too soon.”
“A complex, immersive and inventive experience”
“Subtle, multi-sensory, esoteric and a great lateral addition to the program.”
Gail Priest Realtime 121
Empathic Limb Clinic is an immersive sensory experience for one person at a time. It offers you the chance to cultivate the mind and reconsider your relationship with nature and each other.
This unique live artwork blends horticulture with neuroscience. Cat Jones invites you into The Plantarum, a mobile field laboratory of micro-experiments for an appointment and experience that may literally change your mind.
Jones leads you in an intimate conversation between the human mind and flora. She takes you on a surprising internal journey through deep time from the past, the present, into the future to raise questions of empathy that are global and social, political and personal.
Created and performed by Cat Jones with sound by Melissa Hunt. Provocateur, Kelli McCluskey. Curators, James Berlyn, Sarah Rowbottam.
Is this for me? A sensory experience for those not afraid to experiment with plants and the mind.
This work is a precursor to Somatic Drifts, further expanding Jones’ art/science research combining illusion, empathy and health.
Presentations
performance studies 19, Stanford, USA, June, 2013
Proximity Festival, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth, 24 October – 2 November 2013
The WIRED Lab, Muttama, NSW, 3 May 2014
The Plantarum: Empathic Limb Clinic Proximity Festival 2013 promo from Cat Jones on Vimeo.
“Original, so creative, and lots of fun”
“Plantarum” brought me to tears”
“So special”
“I could feel it for days”
“I will remember this”
Acknowledgements
This project was supported by Australia Council for the Arts through a Creative Australia Fellowship, fo.am and CIA Studios.
Empathic Limb Clinic was first presented at performance studies 19, Stanford, USA.
Special thanks to The Wellcome Trust Library for access to rare materials, SymbioticA, Anna Tregloan, Prof Stephan Schug, Michelle Nunn, Janet Carter, Pierce Davison, Loren Kronemeyer and Cate Hull.
cat jones 