Variations on Idiorrhythmy

A small group of people huddles together, leaning toward one another. The faceless crowd, rendered by the stark application of graphite on paper, forms a circle punctuated by threads in yellow, blue, and red. Emerging from their heads and backs, the ribbons of primary colours visually echo the participants’ formation, uniting each member in an intimate moment of camaraderie. Part of Variations on Idiorrhythmy—a series by Heather Kai Smith that reconceives archival photographs of collective activity through drawing—Grief (above) acknowledges the power of mutual support and strength in numbers for healing.

For Variations on Idiorrhythmy, Smith recalls Roland Barthes, who in How to Live Together posits an interdependent world where the self and collective are deeply entwined.11Roland Barthes, How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces; Notes for a Lecture Course and Seminar at the Collège de France (1976–1977), trans. Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 171. Drawing from the communality of monastic life, Barthes employs the term idiorrhythmie to describe a form of living together that does not preclude individual freedom in spite of the homogenizing tendencies of monasticism. In her drawings, Smith considers idiorrhythmy through iterative depictions of people engaged in communal and embodied practices, including Energy Work and Meditation. The coloured threads reappear here, behaving differently than in Grief. Outside the frame or hovering on top of the figures, each stroke seemingly evokes what is beyond perception: the connective energies of bodies in relation.

Through a visual language that both delineates and blends its subjects, Smith’s group portraits swiftly oscillate between the details and contours, presence, and erasure. At a distance and looking down, the viewer is only peripherally welcomed in, further complicating Smith’s play with inclusion and omission in group dynamics. The crowded rooms of Energy Work and Meditation invite us to feel the chorus of breath and warmth that ripples through them, offering a glimpse into the independent yet shared experience of being in community.