Body Building (Burning)
An ash drawing and filmed burning that uses high-rise architecture as a bodily image and turns destruction into a meditation on residue, release, and remembrance.
Body Building (Burning) uses high-rise architecture as a metaphor for the human body: a temporary structure that holds stories, agency, and lived experience, yet remains subject to time, erosion, and eventual collapse. The work builds on May’s earlier piece Body Building: Infection, which focused on the body at a micro level through the metaphor of internal systems and cellular labour. Here, the focus shifts outward, treating the body as a larger vessel whose apparent solidity is always fragile and temporary.
The work began with ashes passed to the artist by another artist, understood not as waste but as residue: the material trace of a previous form. Mixed with adhesive and painted onto watercolour paper, these ashes became a physical image that was later burned on Brighton Beach and filmed at high speed. What survives is not the original drawing but a sequence of translations, from ash to image, image to fire, and fire to recording. That chain places the piece firmly within May’s wider concern with memory as something built from remains rather than preserved intact.
Additional notes
- Created using ashes mixed with adhesive medium on 300gsm watercolour paper.
- Burned and filmed on Brighton Beach, UK.
- Soundtrack performed live by the artist in response to the filmed burning process.
- The remaining ashes were collected and passed on to another artist as part of the ashes2ashes cycle
Selected images
