In Climbing like a Girl, feminist author, Diane Chisholm describes the phenomenological challenges presented to a young Lynn Hill, who began free climbing at the age of fourteen. Chisholm describes how Hill uses her small stature and flexibility to her advantage in climbing, in contrast to the hyper-masculine strength, which characterised this extreme sport.
I explore the use of climbing a tree, by a young adolescent girl, as an expression of freedom and dexterity, before the body loses its agility. The movements are characterised by these moments of stillness, followed by reaching and grasping. The video essay uses extracts from the book, detailing Lynn Hills’ use of breath and stillness to project strength, calling on her implicit knowledge as a gymnast. I use cynatope images of my daughter climbing a tree, as moments of stillness in contrast to the moving images from the animated liDAR scans of an ancient beech tree. These photographs introduce my younger daughter, whose dexterity and fearlessness in climbing is explored in both the Figurative and Temporal Curves, when I re-map her dancing body aged fourteen.