In our call out for Something Other’s Thirteenth Chapter, On Elasticity, we asked: What does elasticity offer, or promise? How far can something (or we) stretch? Across how many locations, borders, crises? How does elasticity sound? What do we hear across the borders? What bends, what flexes, what will return, what will bear the load? Does language s t r e t c h? What is unbearable, what is unreturnable, what will spring back to form? What will snap?
Some things never return to form, as Karen Christopher tells us in measures of responsiveness: still quite unformed – water, for instance, does not have a shape to return to. Other things are on their way to becoming elastic. Mark Joseph’s Prototypes imagines the experiments leading to the right kind of malleability. What are the stages between inelasticity and elasticity, between stasis and change? How much should the world give?
In Trish Scott’s Untitled (Site), repetition reveals the elasticity of meaning, alongside the contingency of words – which appear differently depending on context, or perhaps they string different contexts together, depending on your own interpretation. In Susan Rudy’s Judith Butler, the jolly jumper, and me, other people’s words come to represent the author’s own experiences, as she negotiates with the cultural perceptions of ‘motherhood’, a category that requires full-body elasticity as part of its cultural constraints. In Score, by Alexandra Baybutt and Mary Paterson, language fails in its attempt to stretch to experience. Their piece makes use of the language of Likeart scales that attempt to quantify subjective experiences.
Welter, by Victoria Gray and Sam Williams, is also concerned with the possibility of expressing subjectivity. Their collaborative film explores the sensory landscape of autistic experience, of living, as the artists say, ‘with an elastic sensitised brain.’ Occupying an elastic stretch of time, Outstart, by Samantha Francis, balloons into the the first fifteen minutes of wakefulness in the morning, while Carnations, by Caridad Svich, calls and stretches to a lover across the expanse of time.
Working with sound, Rhiannon Armostrong’s On First Meeting explores the dance of language, remixing a meeting between the artist and her neighbour, in which words represent only a small portion of meaning. Meanwhile A. Lyre’s ASW #003.9[d] presents a building soundscape that expands and contracts, like a series of collaborative heartbeats.
A common theme amongst the works gathered here is the agency of the external, even non-human, world – to move, to interpret, to constrain, to perceive. Helen Savage’s Biros accepts the surreal possibility that pens are multiplying. Equally surreal but more sinister, Maddy Costa’s Resilience (is not resistance) considers the human impact of economic conditions, as manifested in automated language and business speak. Maddy’s approach returns us to the call out, in which we considered the philosopher Sara Ahmed’s reflections on “moments of snap”: “how worlds are organised to enable some to breathe, how they leave less room for others.”
Most of the works gathered here were also performed at our event at the Live Art Development Agency on the 14th July 2025. We offer this Chapter now in temporal elasticity and solidarity – do you feel the elastic tethering us to the then and the now and the maybe?
Diana, Maddy & Mary.
Something Other 