Are you abundant?
A commissioned text by Newcastle-based artist Rosie Morris on Abundance.
Image by Amelia Read
Me Lost Me’s soft, fizzy drone ‘sludge’ melts into my head. Am I feeling abundant? I rotate my neck and hear the tension crack, rocking it there for a while. Briefly closing my eyes, I breathe and feel my weight ground itself into the soft matting, then rearrange my chosen sherbet-yellow duvet to support my tail bone and the small of my back. I secretly long to pile it up on top of me like a childhood den, filtering glowing light. I notice a message printed along one quilt’s base beside me: ‘unfurl’. These small acts feel caring and considered. I relax into this embrace.
Artist and choreographer Lizzie Klotz and designer Bethany Wells’ installation is an elegant, spacious, soft-play-style spring flower bouquet. It is a bouquet that feels joyous and celebratory (we are greeted by a dreamy disco of colourful spinning duvets). It is also generous: the longer we stay, walk, listen, lie, rest, roll and fold ourselves into the space, the more it becomes an offering to ground ourselves and connect to our bodies through reflection and attention. My friend crouches inside one of the slowly spinning duvets. ‘You should try it’ she says. I do inside a brown chrysalis-like one, breathing in deeply. My kid cackles delightedly under a mound of duvets nearby. I could stay in this chrysalis for a really long time.
The gallery windows and fluorescent lighting are lemon-lime yellow and hot pink: colour filtering light gels borrowed from the toolbox of stage design. The effect is a kind of intoxication. It reverberates, changes with the sun, is all encompassing, and disrupts reality, bathing us as a performer in this created stage. The sound track moves on to No.4, ‘rest’: a sparse, sprinkling, dawn chorus. In the shade of the room, at the end, I am cocooned in walls of deep burgundy, with various hues of soft duvets and green squidgy underlay. These elements borrow from the familiarity of domesticity, but in this gallery context become otherworldly in that they demarcate a place of refuge both within and also set apart from the world: a protective bubble or shield.
Klotz and Wells have created a space brimming with invitation and possibility, to participate on our own terms and at our own pace. Scattered around the walls, and on the duvets are written notations, or scores: ‘envelop yourself… linger… build a den… become a landscape’. These offer a gentle scaffold of instructions for moving or reflecting with intention and attention. You can also choose an eye mask, take headphones or access a QR code to listen to your own intimate sonic landscape.
Along one wall a line of tiny quilted interlocking duvets stitched together depict a venn diagram of sorts with the words: ‘scarcity’, ‘enough’, ‘abundance’, ‘excess’. These words are terminologies that sit within a capitalist framework of resource availability and consumer desire. There is a critical awareness at play here of how abundance might sit within a global political landscape where we feel wanting in so many ways. Something about the duvet's miniature scale seems to point our attention back from the macro to the micro: something intimate and achievable rather than distant aspirational marketing.
The exhibition is part of an expansive live performance project, Abundance, devised by Lizzie Klotz in partnership with Dance City, Northumberland Dance Development and The NewBridge Project. Following Klotz’s intergenerational collaboration with Boundless, Dance City's over 55s performance company, it is shaped by experiences and connections with artists, collaborators, and community members across multiple contexts in the North East. It builds on ideas explored during Klotz’s MotherOther Residency at NewBridge, for artists who are parents and carers, forging relationships with the interconnected community of artists and residents that form around NewBridge’s evolving programme. Delving into what abundance can mean and feel like from a plurality of perspectives, Klotz and Wells have invited collaborators into NewBridge’s ongoing activities. Gatherings have included clay workshops with artist and ceramicist Megan Randall at The Memory Cafe, and a community feast and dance parties with The NewBridge Community Facilitator and chef Kaltouma Hassaballah, by and for women in the local area. What a wealth of stories and bodies to learn from.
The resulting installation sets out to not only be a solitary stage, but also a convening one, as the installation hosts a variety of activities including: The NewBridge Project’s programme of Coffee Mornings, Solidarity Screenings, Saturday Socials, a Lady Party, feast and a series of invited Open Rehearsals with Lizzie Klotz, dancer Alys North, musician Jayne Dent (Me Lost Me), Noize Choir, and artists Chloë Sayers and Ziza Patrick. These interventions activate the space through many voices, as well as creating space for people to participate, rest, gather and share space with others.
At the time of writing, Klotz has toured the live performance of Abundance, to Dance City in Newcastle, Queen’s Hall in Hexham, and Alnwick Playhouse. It is also part of the forthcoming Ageless Festival at Yorkshire Dance in Leeds this July. I attended the Alnwick Playhouse performance with my friends and our kids in April. The cast was intergenerational and composed of three professionals and three local dance volunteers. After a cast member’s introduction, each performer luxuriously rolled across a heaped line of duvets, slowly elongating the stretch, effort and laze of waking. Revelling in the sumptuousness of a morning without responsibility, their bodies cumulatively compressed the plump line of pillowy softness, eliciting our own bodily memories of aching, stretching and releasing into the day.
The performance, like this installation, was sculptural, restful, relational, collaborative, exuberant and joyful, celebrating everyday activities like the unspoken familial exchange of folding bedsheets, or dancing like no-one is watching in the kitchen. I recall my fascination with the casts’ ankles, how they each balanced, supported and held the dancers weight and movement.
I notice that my ankles feel heavy, but my mind dances like a child in this space. Klotz tells me of her advice to the volunteers in Alnwick: ‘let joy override fear’. It feels like Klotz and Wells, together with Me Lost Me’s sound, have jointly barricaded out some of life's outside pressures, their outstretched arms carving a space for joy and simply being. It feels liberating. It feels abundant.
Rosie Morris, June 2026