Performance | “Mud Ash Gold” Ritual

Performance | “Mud Ash Gold” Ritual

Original was uploaded on 2025-04-22

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Performer: Nklusive
Location: AUGUST Gallery Residency
Artist: Trina Merry

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ARTIST STATEMENT:

MUD. ASH. GOLD.
A site-specific ritual and fine art performance created for Earth Day.

Filmed inside a contemporary art gallery, this work is both a rite of purification and a visual poem told through the elements—mud, ash, and gold—using butoh-inspired movement and performance art traditions. The piece is intentionally slow, contemplative, and grounded in themes of ecological grief and spiritual transformation.
• Mud is origin and return: we come from the earth and we return to it.
• Ash is grief and destruction: a residue of fire, symbolizing both natural cycles and catastrophic events, including the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
• Gold is transcendence: a sacred material representing divinity and alchemical rebirth.

This work is not entertainment. It is invocation.
The performance here is not objectified, but reclaimed—treated as sacred ground, a conduit through which we confront our relationship with the planet, with memory, and with mortality. The body is used as a vessel and as a brush for marking the surface (a la Yves Klein, Ana Mendieta, & more).

This is performance art.
This is ritual.
This is an offering.

All elements used are natural and symbolic. This gallery performance is presented solely within the context of fine art, spiritual expression, and cultural commentary.

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About the Artist
Trina Merry is a leading figure in contemporary bodypaint and performance art, working in the lineage of artists like Yves Klein, Yayoi Kusama, and Veruschka. She studied with Robert Wilson and Marina Abramović as a Watermill Center resident and trained with Alex & Allyson Grey in visionary art. Merry’s work juxtaposes the ephemeral human body with architectural and elemental environments, forming a distinct visual and conceptual language.

She has exhibited at The Whitney Biennial, Getty Villa, San Jose Museum of Art (with Andy Goldsworthy), Museo de Bardini (Florence), Attleboro Arts Museum, and more.

Learn more or book a commission at: https://www.trinamerry.com/