A Score for Surface is a collaborative proposition by artist-designers Phoebe Whitman and Michelle Mantsio. Can a moving shadow touch or move us through a space? How do techniques of construction and capture impact the rolling affect of such an event?
This driven enquiry will experiment with surface materiality as a sequence of assemblages. How do we understand surface? When exploring surface in the context of materiality, what is created? What draws our attention? Where are the malleable moments that provide scope for developing affect? How does this influence the impact and potential of relational connections between surface and environment? How do we create a heightened attentiveness to the stable and adaptive qualities available?
The duo will develop A Score for Surface as an active archive working with the five canons used in rhetorical education. It will work with: inventio (invention), dispositio (arrangement), elocutio (style), memoria (memory), and actio (delivery). Additionally, they will engage with the history of rhetoric in Athens. In doing so, this residency aims to be an active porous score that engages with embodiment implicitly and explicitly. Given our research interests on surface, embodiment, and tactility, how might we generate a fertile discussion about how these qualities exist?
The score will be developed using durational processes, including walking, diagramming, set design, and conversation. How can this time be used to actively experiment and extend this language of surfacing we are developing? The project will explore the tacit, performed, and challenged relationships emerging through the materialisation of a score for surface.
is a lecturer, artist, and designer. Her research-based practice explores intersections of body, pattern, and improvisation through contemporary art and design. Working across film, installation, performance, textiles, and design, she investigates embodiment, agency, and relational becoming within spatio-temporal conditions. She holds Bachelor of Fine Art, Masters of Art in Public Space, and a PhD titled Lagniappe (2026).