S H A R E D H A B I T A T
E I L A G O L D H A H N
S T U A R T J Y O U N G
The name Shared Habitat describes a common field in which different participants, forms of life and perspectives coexist. What is shared is not a single point of view, but the situation in which different actions, perceptions and processes meet and contribute to what unfolds.
Shared Habitat emerged from the collaborative practice of Eila Goldhahn and Stuart J Young in the early 1990s. Its projects have often developed through sustained relationships with particular places and communities.
In 1993, Shared Habitat initiated the Dartington to Totnes Foot and Cycle Path in partnership with Sustrans. In 2013, it established the Pfälzer Hof Artist Residencies in Idar-Oberstein, Germany, with support from the town council. Since 2008, The Field, a three-acre site in the South Hams, Devon, has become a place of long-term ecological stewardship and artistic research through observation, movement, sculpture and photography.
Across these very different projects, Shared Habitat has remained concerned with what develops through inhabiting, observing and acting within a situation over time.
Eila Goldhahn
Eila Goldhahn is an artist, researcher and educator working across sculpture, installation, photography, performance, film, writing and movement-based research.
Her practice investigates relationships between embodiment, perception and knowledge, and the different positions from which we encounter and make sense of the world.
Goldhahn is the originator of MoverWitness, an embodied practice developed from the Discipline of Authentic Movement and articulated through the MoverWitness paradigm in her PhD, Shared Habitats: the MoverWitness Paradigm (2007). Her research explores embodied and situated observation across artistic and interdisciplinary contexts.
Eila teaches MoverWitness and offers individual and group training in the practice.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3852-8076
Stuart J Young
Stuart J Young is a painter, photographer and sculptor whose work explores relationships between form, colour, material and place.
Having previously worked in biochemistry, his continuing engagement with science and the natural world informs both his individual practice and his collaborations with Eila Goldhahn.
His long-term photographic practice includes Flowers of the Field, an ongoing study of plants encountered within The Field. Through repeated looking and returning, photography becomes a practice of sustained attention — an approach Goldhahn first described as camera-witnessing in Shared Habitats (2007).
Alongside his visual practice, Stuart composes music and sings with Devon Chorale.