Travelling Gallery, a contemporary art gallery in a bus, will be visiting Helmsdale and Thurso this
April, with the exhibition to avoid falling apart by Emmie McLuskey and Janice Parker. This two-
person art exhibition explores and illuminates our human capacity for mutuality, connection and
interdependence through movement, language, and film.

Together Emmie and Janice have developed a movement workshop in collaboration with an invited mix of friends and colleagues. From this, they will create several short films focusing on the active state of counterbalance – the physical act of two or more human bodies leaning against or leaning away from each other. The films will invite the viewer to witness shared and reciprocal acts of support, capturing the details and nuances of these movements in the moment as they dynamically unfold between people. We see each person searching for the points of balance between them in order to hold each other up and to avoid falling apart. Accompanying the films, will be a collection of hand-written texts created by the artists in response to the workshop and the films.

Both artists bring to the Travelling Gallery their shared interest in how we live together and how we
experience our moving bodies in society; asking what might happen if we led with our movement
and our ordinary/extraordinary human bodies.

The Travelling Gallery will be visiting the following venues in Caithness and Sutherland, in
partnership with Timespan, Helmsdale and Thurso Community Development Trust.
Wednesday 19th April – Helmsdale Harbour
Thursday 20th April – Helmsdale Primary School (school visits only)
Friday 21st April – Helmsdale

The gallery is open 10am – 4pm and is free to visit. Everyone is very welcome!

Janice Parker is an artist and choreographer, based in Edinburgh. She creates work in collaboration with people, place and context, and believes in art as an act of quiet, or noisy, activism, proposing and putting into practice personal, social and cultural change. 

Emmie McLuskey is an artist based in Glasgow. She works with other artists to produce collaborative work; this has previously taken the form of publications, events, objects, conversations, writing and exhibitions.