drawings
writing
2024.
Props by Hunter Smith and Ginger Dymke, ritual performance at Macaulay Station, video, projection and installation.
b/w photograph, Unknown Maker Bed Sheet, Horse Head and Mink.
Broke Companion Horse Head by Ginger Dymke.
Broke Companion is a collaborative project between Hunter Smith and Ginger Dymke, whose practice’s converge in site-responsive, narrative-based works, ambient projections and a shared curiosity for ritual.
Ginger’s practice is an exercie in conjuring the corpses of localised indsutry to re-establish their relevance today. The use of lo fi and hi fi materials (emphasising iconography, mess and a love of hard rubbish) entangles with Hunter’s practice, forming strong relationships with representations of human ritual found in popular media, mythologised histories and advertising.
The works intuit associations to the body, consistently returning to anthropomorphism and themes of birth and decay through material interactions with space, scale and movement. The first Broke Companion project was exhibited in 2023 in a group show at the Joseph Beuys Cafe, where two canvases were sandwiched together in response to Beuys’ animal obsession. Broke Companion’s most recent works proliferate the intersection between the two practices. Applying Hunter’s focus on the methodologies of celtic quilting, heraldry, human and women’s labour to Ginger’s poetic reinvigoration of dilapidated cultural artefacts, they form a shared sensibility that prioritises theatrical, engrossing and haphazard meditations on ritual, where objects are regarded like props in a stage performance.