Hold Tight

Hold Tight is a series of photographic and video works that explore the performative actions and needs of physical contact, such as being held, through the backdrop of a socially distant world. How will the present influence the future around actions of comfort and need post social distancing?

In these works, Portmann enacts actions of comfort, common positions of being held or holding onto someone, with a white shopfront mannequin. The resulting images and videos become a record of private performance, almost instructional in appearance. Contained within the works is the use of proprioception, captured within both the artist and the mannequin, that speaks not just of the physical, but also the psychological associations of physical contact between two people and the space of absence when it is not present.

The title of the work plays into the double entendre of the phrase itself. To Hold Tight is to both physically hold onto something or someone, as well as being to stay the course, seeing an event or period of time through to the end.