BREATH QUARTET

Breath Quartet is a collective of four artists consisting of Patrick Ziza (movement/artist), Marcus Herne (sound artist), James Merrell (photographer, and artist founder, Margot Wilson. The collective perform rituals to our common ancestors on the annual solstices and equinoxes in site-specific environments, working through mediums of performance, sculpture, painting, drawing and sound. Breath Quartet performances are a collaborative blend of human and cosmic breath speaking to in human interrelation irrespective of gender, race, class, religion, or politic.

Breath Quartet’s creative methods is through improvisational approaches and breathing techniques that dive into a spiral wave of energy, effectively initiating the body to naturally start moving, aided, and amplified by soundscapes. Wilson, Ziza, and Herne, enter into a trance, erupting into a cosmic phenomenon reaching to an altered state of mind.

See Breath Quartet's new website:

HOLY ISLAND (2025)

Filmed on Holy Island, Northumbria | May 2025
Performance: Patrick Ziza
Filming: Margot Fraser Wilson
Music and Video Editing: Marcus Herne
Special Thanks: James Merrell
We Have Always Walked (Part II) continues Breath Quartet’s exploration of shelter as a space of spiritual, physical and ancestral refuge.
This work was created during an overnight pilgrimage to Holy Island, also known as Lindisfarne, a tidal landscape long associated with early monastic life, sanctuary and crossing thresholds. The island’s shifting access and deep time resonance offered a powerful backdrop for an unscripted collaboration. Ziza and Wilson arrived with a shared intention to remain responsive and open.
Ziza brought a hand-dyed textile used in a previous ritual performance in Chile, along with stories from a recent international residency. Wilson filmed using a small Fujifilm camera on loan from photographer James Merrell. Together they followed the horizon with a soft gaze, allowing the work to form at the edges of perception. The resulting footage is handheld and intentionally soft in focus, echoing the fragility of breath and the instability of remembering.
Later in quiet reflection they recorded Ziza’s recollections and performance of a Rwandan clapping song from childhood. That memory now informs the next phase of the project.
Herne edited the final film and composed a soundscape that carries the pulse of ancestral memory and evokes a borderless field where inner and outer worlds converge.

SPRING EQUINOX (2024)

Filmed at Long Sands Beach, Tynemouth, North Shields on 20th March 2024: Spring Equinox Sunrise: 06:06 am
Performance: Patrick Ziza, Marcus Herne, Margo Fraser Wilson
Filming: James Merrell
Music: Marcus Herne
Special Thanks: Northumbria County Council
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Breath Quartet: We Have Always Walked... (Spring Equinox 2024)

Breath Quartet @ Long Sands Beach, Tynemouth, North Shields on 20th March 2024: Spring Equinox Sunrise: 06:06 am
 
‘WE HAVE ALWAYS WALKED’ is Breath Quartet’s third collaboration celebrating the season change and performing an improvised ritual for our common ancestors. This project is a special one, speaking directly to all the world’s wanderers, pilgrims, uprooted and displaced souls, searchers, explorers, the curious, the lost, the broken, the found, the confused, those grieving, those weeping, those singing, those praying, those speaking, sharing, laughing, teaching, learning, passing on wisdom, exchanging gifts, cooking, eating, sleeping, sheltering, healing, leading, following, holding hands, holding each other, loving each other, loving, breathing, breathing, loving, smiling, hearing each other, heading towards and from the horizon, heading towards and from the sea, sharing a common ancestral thread, sharing common ancestors, hearing them whisper with every step ‘we have always walked, we have always walked….we have always walked….’ @margot_wilson_art @patrickziza @jamesmerrellphotography @marcusherne @breathquartet.

WINTER SOLSTICE EXTENDED (2024)

Breath Quartet's extended Winter Solstice improvised performance at Safe House #1, Peckham, London on 21st January 2024. Unrehearsed and our first time performing as a collective, our aim was vibrationally and sonically 'find each other'. Unable to see each other for most of the performance each artist had to emerge through chaos of breath, voice, bird song, bells, drums, thunder gong and incense, fold on fold rising in cacophonous waves. Margot Wilson Patrick Ziza, Haedong Lee, Yidan Kim, Marcus Herne, James Merrell.
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Breath Quartet: Winter Solstice 2024 (Extended)
ABOUT BREATH QUARTET

Breath Quartet is an improvisational collaboration between myself, Marcus Herne, Patrick Ziza and James Merrell. Using experimental and traditional tantric and shamanic breath practices such as kundalini 'breath of fire' my body is both percussion and wind instrument. This film shows our first live collaboration performed at Powerhouse Studios in Surrey. Inspiration was drawn from my ongoing research into protoconsciousness and proto-emergence and theories such as 'the orchestral universe' led by Stuart Hameroff and Sir Roger Penrose. Earlier this year I attended and shared my research at the Science of Consciousness Conference in Sicily. I came away with deep awe at the role of microtubules in orchestral consciousness. As a life long practitioner of experimental meditation and energy channelling the notion of the cosmos and consciousness being musical resonates for me. Our Breath Quartet improvisations invoke ancestral voices, rhythms, and spiral flow that circulate fluidly throughout the 'body' of the quartet. Improvisational collaboration is a generative space and place for a nameless, post-ontological breath to be heard, felt, shared, inhabited, inhaled, exhaled, elevated, levitated.

Marcus Herne's original Celtic and shamanic sounds weave a sonic spectacle that urge both performers and audience to raise arms, spreads wings, and fly. Patrick Ziza's continuous flow traces the bends and pulses of the cosmic waves. James Merrell's presence and ethereal eye captures the beautiful collective organ of breath. Breath Quartet is committed to one thing, the universal basis of human life: breath. At the end of the performance we concluded that the improvisation was 'not a performance', neither was it a 'happening'. We're sitting with this.
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This first edit uses only the sound recorded by the Fuji X100 camera. The full length 2.5 hour film will use the studio recording. All breath and vocals are raw and though amplified are not electronically altered.

The location is Powerhouse Recording Studios in Addlestone, Surrey UK. Our next performance will be site-specific and with audience participation.

BREATH QUARTET is seeking galleries and performance venues to expand and experiment with this investigative practice.  Initially interested in locations in London, New York, Europe.

Earlier Vocal Experimentation

MA is the signifier for my breath and voice performance art. These four short videos document an improvisation session with composer Marcus Herne. The filming is by photographer James Merrell. Following the breath and charting the geometry of the voice was the aim, amplifying sound as volume and VOLUME. Using my body as vessel and amplifier is critical to this investigation, intersection performance with astrological concepts of the geometry of sound. These are rough cuts with no editing of the soundtrack recorded by the camera. Marcus is currently working with the professional recordings which I'll share in due course. This project builds on my meditation and expanded breath practice and intersection of sentient sculpture and performance.

MAA Tetraptych: 4 AMPLIFICATIONS

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This is the warm up session seeking the geometry of connection. Improvisation opens a multi-dimensional space inviting a 'jump on' point or colliding intersection that interrupts the travel of flow. This binding or holding of a collision is a sonic fugue in which spatio-temporal stillness co-exists with expanding forces. In my 20's I listened day and night to Bach and read Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Esher, Bach, immediately recognising the reality of 'fugue' as the basis of stabliised but not static form. Filming by Sound Design and Original Composing by Marcus Herne, Filming by James Merrell. Editing by Margot Wilson. This is a collaboration project born out of passion for improvisation.

Although titled First MA, it is actually the LAST MA. In terms of improvisation techniques I call it my 'Britney' performance. This will never happen on stage as the vision I have combines my live voice and live music mediated by dimensionalised light and sound as astrological geometry. Filming by Sound Design and Original Composing by Marcus Herne, Filming by James Merrell. Editing by Margot Wilson. This is a collaboration project born out of passion for improvisation.
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This was the most powerful session of the day, one in which I gave myself permission to step fully into Gaia's wound and pain. I wanted to give voice to the rage of planet Earth, of Gaia, of Venus, of the Matriarch forgotten. This was both the easiest and hardest thing I've ever done. More to follow. Filming by James Merrell. Sound Design and Original Composing by Marcus Herne. Editing by Margot Wilson.

FURIES COLLECTIVE

The Furies Collective formed in April 2024 at the Royal College of Art. After months of deep research into Palaeolithic Venus I wanted to bring together wildly talented female and non-binary artists. The name rose out of the Aphrodite thread of this Venus Project, meaning sea foam, and a wider sweep across how mystical women are depicted throughout the Patriarchal Era. The Furies are generally cast as wrathful, vengeful, intense anger, furious.... However, the Greek term for Furies is Erinyes and is of uncertain etymology with connections with the verb ὀρίνειν orinein, "to raise, stir, excite". I wanted to adopt a new gaze and motion of fury that is intensely felt but is benevolent. Coming together and through the collective practice of making installation art we Furies aim to activate spaces as places that transform the Patriarchal female, and for me, reclaim Patriarchal Venus.
ONE EXTENDED MEDITATION by the FURIES COLLECTIVE is the debut exhibition of their curatorial trilogy. It will introduce the various practices of each member, and seeks to explore the ‘impulse’ of the creative act through its intimate and meditative process as they work together. Drawing from theatrical improvisation and experimental meditation techniques, the audience is invited to witness and immerse themselves within the collective experience of creation. Each artist will be showing existing work from their own practice, and will also collaborate with other members of the collective to create new work.

FURIES COLLECTIVE are a group of female and non-binary artists who met at The Royal College of Art. The term Furies is the verb iteration of the word Erinyes, meaning "to raise, stir, excite".  They approach every aspect of art as a verb and a portal of transformation, only possible with and through audience alchemy. Through this, their mission is to raise, stir, and excite the white box gallery into one energetic extended meditation.

The collective are: Suni Mullen, ATHENA Mothership, Sara Emil, Maria Helena Toscano, Amanda Cornish, Lujane Pagganwala, Elinor Henry, Margot Wilson, and Hannah Dowling. 

FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM @furies.collective FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE LIVE PROGRAMME OF EVENING PERFORMANCES.

Hannah Dowling, Curator
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