HUMAN CLAY CIC

EVENTS ARCHIVE FRIENDSPARTNERS MEMBERS CONTACT TEAM

Human Clay CIC is a non-profit, practice-based organisation rooted in Devon, UK, working at the intersection of performance, ecology, and cultural heritage. We create films, performances, workshops, and research projects that explore the embodied experience of being-in-the-world, where land, memory, movement, and imagination converge.

We believe the body is a site of sensing, remembering, and transformation. Through practices of dance, ritual, storytelling, and visual art, we engage with ancestral knowledge, more-than-human presence, and the unseen rhythms that shape life. Our work is guided by eco-somatic awareness and an ethic of attention, offering forms of artistic inquiry that reawaken our relationship to place, perception, and the elemental world.

Whether through film, live performance, or collaborative research, we explore the vibrancy of multispecies entanglement, the poetics of decay and renewal, and the deep time of cultural and ecological continuity. We seek to create works that are felt, works that listen, respond, and honour their sources.

Human Clay exists to support community-rooted and cross-cultural exchange. We collaborate with artists, researchers, weavers, dancers, elders, and ecologists to cultivate spaces where art becomes a practice of kinship, ceremony, and reclamation.

PROJECT ARCHIVE

TO DIE INTO A BIRD

Film | 21 min | Dartmoor National Park| UK

A fairy tale. A music epic. A visual hybrid of dance, sculpture, song, and ritual.
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HOLE IN THE GROUND

Film | 6min | Dartmoor National Park | UK

A site-specific gathering around a vast earth cavity, exploring burial, dissolution, and re-formation as thresholds of body and land.
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OCEAN TONGUE

Oceanic Geathering | Ayrmer Cove | Devon | UK

A site-specific gathering at Ayrmer Cove & Open Play & Improvisation

IT TOOK FOUR SUMMERS STORMS FOR HER LOVE TO EXPLODE INTO A THOUSAND FRUITING BODIES

Dance Film | 8.5 min | Spazio500 | Trento | Italy

This short dance film unfolds as an eco-somatic invocation—a movement offering to the fungal kingdom and the porous, decomposing body of the earth.
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ONTOLOGICAL MUTANY

Performance | 40 min | Startelpa Performance Festival | Riga | Latvia

A dance tale for the threshold of extinction.
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GRIMSPOUND

Performance | 40 min | Sentient Performativities: Thinking Alongside the Human Symposium | Dartmoor | UK

Grimspound is a site-responsive performance rooted in the ruins of a Late Bronze Age settlement on Dartmoor. Carried by wind, peat, and the echo of ritual, the piece invites performers and audience into a living encounter with ancestral time and elemental presence.
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GO WHEREVER YOU WISH FOR VERILY YOU ARE WELL PROTECTED

Group Exhibition and Performance Programme | Dartington Hall Estate | UK

https://gowhereeveryouwish.persona.co
This group exhibition gathered thirteen artists whose practices bridge states of becoming, shape-shifting, and return. Specialists in the unseen, the unspoken, and the deeply felt.
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SPANDA

Performance | 60 min| Fivizzano27 | Rome | Italy

Spanda—from Sanskrit, meaning vibration, flutter, or divine pulse—is a collaborative performance rooted in somatic inquiry, acoustic intimacy, and material tension.
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MYCELIA MEMORIES

Performance | 30 min | Spazio500, Palazzo Malfatti | Italy

A somatic offering to the intelligence of fungi, Mycelia Memories is a 30-minute live performance exploring the interwoven vitality of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Five performers moved as kin—human, fungal, and beyond—inhabiting the micro- and macrocosm of a living entity in flux.
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EVENTS WORKSHOPS GEATHERINGS

Rooted in eco-somatic inquiry, animist cosmologies, and the raw poetics of movement, these workshops open as rituals of dissolution and becoming. Participants are invited into a shared passage — through slowness, silence, and the strange intelligence of the body—where old forms are shed.
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