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East London Art Prize x Backyard Biennial: participatory workshops 'Tangle/Untangle' and live performance 'Sand Suit...

Participatory workshops and a live performance exploring how bodies carry, share, and negotiate inherited and socially learned pressures. Image by Jane Lam East London Art Prize 2025 artist Lydia Newman will host two participatory workshops in collaboration with Jae Gibbs as space-holder, Tangle/Untangle (2026), where she uses sand-filled tights to create collective entanglement, exploring how bodies carry, share, and negotiate inherited and socially learned pressures. She will also present a live participatory performance, Sand Suit 4.0 (2026), an embodied storytelling work developed in dialogue with the workshops and her ongoing series In the Wake of Ruin. ‘Tangle/Untangle’ Workshops: 1.30-4.30pm Saturday 25 July & 2-4 pm Sunday 26 July 2026 (ticketed) Developed by Lydia Newman in collaboration with Jae Gibbs as space holder, Tangle/Untangle is set within a crumbling cityscape and explores how inherited systems shape the ways bodies move, relate, adapt and understand themselves in relation to others. In the first workshop, participants use sand-filled tights as a shared material to create a collective entanglement: negotiating, moving and collaborating to form a sculpture in constant motion. The second workshop centres on the slower act of untangling, inviting participants and witnesses to join Lydia in gradually unravelling the structure created the previous day, followed by a shared conversation held around the remains of the work.