Rory Pilgrim is an artist woking across expressions of gender, sexuality, and cultural or generational divides. They are the winner of the 2019 Prix de Rome award and works with many institutions in Holland and the UK.
Pilgrim set the tone for their emotive presentation by instigating an intimate experience between the audience members. To the tune of Rihanna's "stay", the audience was instructed to join our hands, sending a pulse throughout the participants, pointing and following with the gaze, and improvising "self expression" with our hands.
This exercise shifted the typical dynamic of viewer and speaker, and also served as an example of Pilgrim's skill in joining people together, through an experience that familiarised us with each other in a haptic, non verbal way.
Pilgrim started to explain their work through their own life story, using an "Identity pizza" to illustrate their work's relationship to their origin, explaining that as the child of an anglican vicar, Pilgrim grew up in the church community which infiltrated their home life and blurred the boundaries between the public and the private.
The phone became a symbol of this, its ring often penetrating the home space and bringing the outside world in to the family home.
Music was of great importance in a childhood framed by faith, with their participation in cathedral choirs and witnessing of music as a form of devotion impressing upon them the potential of music to build and bind a community.
Over the following years, Pilgrim discovered their queer, non binary identity, leading them to seek out a queer community and perhaps informing an interest in the things that bind us- the painful and the beautiful- which is present in their work.
Throughout Pilgrim's talk it became clear that the idea of the 'socially engaged' artwork is central to their practice. The question of 'Who needs what I am making? Who wants what I am making' seems to root their work in an intentional and directional practice that takes inspiration from activism and 'aspires to be radical'.
An obsession with language is a strong undercurrent in the work, exploring the binaries of language and how it can be used to transform ones experience. Pilgrim postulated that perhaps one root of this is their experience of word use within the queer community, and the potential for words to be formative or destructive. Their 6 month long experience of a stutter impressed upon a nineteen year old Pilgrim the privilege of language, and how the ability to communicate informs one's presence in the world. To materialise their interest in language further, Pilgrim became fluent in Estonian, questioning the responsibility that comes with learning and speaking a foreign language. With a sophisticated understanding of the language, Pilgrim experimented with directing all of their work to Estonia and Estonian people. Pilgrim's interest in the connective effect of the internet through Wikipedia became an inspiration for another point of connection; their BA work culminated in trying to twin the English town of Weymouth with Estonia's Haapsalu.
A developing practice revealed Pilgrim's desire to work with young people, calling to question the way young people communicate and are listened to. Their work developed a relationship with climate activism, translating young peoples experiences of living in a deteriorating world and the responsibility that comes with it into a beautiful film "The Undercurrent" created in Illinois with the participation of teenage climate activists.
Pilgrim's tender, humble description of his concerns and interests seemed to reveal an artist interested in polarities, asking questions such as "How can we be separate, but connected?" and making work that provides a nuanced insight into the delicately balanced identities we form through our culture, our histories, and our environment.
The memorable presentation ended with Pilgrim sensitively remarking "We have to have despair to have hope", seeming to encapsulate the feeling of a room touched by a despairing, yet hopeful artist.
Comments