Gabrielle Hoad

• About
• Artworks
  • The Signal and the Noise
  • Delicate Instruments
  • Clouded Border
  • Ghost Moth
  • Night Piece
  • The whistle draws
    attention to the signal
  • Hiding places (home from home)
  • Salt-cat (keeps them at home)
  • Turn (the) leaves
  • Fatal exchanges
  • pigeon steps
  • lie lie lie
  • Street Rockery
  • A house of leaves
  • Hide
  • The Luminous Envelope
  • Feed
  • Columbarium (all that remains)
  • The further away they are
  • The Geometry of Air
  • Interloper
  • Listen to Easterbrooks
  • The Great British Banana
  • Mutter Erde
  • Is and Was
  • Observatory
  • River Bovey Walk
  • Space as defined by two
    separate systems
  • The spaces where things
    have been
  • I draw them. They draw me.
  • What the world becomes
• Projects
  • The walls tremble
  • Clouded Border
  • Read (to) the trees
  • The Buffer Zone
  • Preston Street Union
  • LEAN
  • Solid Air
  • Foreign Soil
  • HEIST
  • Stowage
  • Exeter Studios Project
• Moving Image
  • The Porous Body
  • The Signal and the Noise
  • Two-handed timekeeper
  • Orbit
  • the predecessor to your prayer
  • Crosstalk
  • lark stone
  • Bound
• Writing
• Shop
• Contact

The Porous Body | 2025 | 4m 12s of 16:9 digital video

The Porous Body is the first iteration of a larger moving image project about female mediums in the late 19th and early 20th century.

This first film focuses on materialising mediums (ie those that summoned physical materials, voices and objects to the seance room) and their brush with science. It's a tangled story of faith and rationality, the limited power that women held in a highly patriarchal society, and the obsession of the Victorians with pushing at the frontiers of scientific discovery.