Having relocated from London to Bristol following my degree with Middlesex University I have come to be part of Bristol’s vibrant performance art scene and have been given amazing opportunities to perform at internationally renowned performance festivals such as FIERCE and Inbetween Time as well as undertaking local performances and residencies with artists such as the Paul Hurley, Duncan Speakman, Pacitti Company and La Pocha Nostra. I was made an Arnolfini Associate Artist whilst the Live Programme was held under Helen Cole, now the director of Inbetween Time Festival.
My recent body of work and subsequent Master of Philosophy dissertation with The University of Bristol focused upon the increasingly popular mode of one-to-one performance. During my MPhil I made a number of one-to-one works, notably a piece titled The Moment Before We Kiss which was chosen by public vote for inclusion in FIERCE Festival in 2008 (Birmingham, UK). In 2008 I was chosen by The University of The West of England with whom I started my Masters studies to show my performance work in Budapest, Hungary. I was part of a fine arts show in the MAMU gallery with an accompanying performance Encounter for Budapest.
In the process of writing my dissertation I noticed that my one-to-one work was more focused upon the relationship between artist and audience rather than aesthetic concerns. This prompted a new phase of my work where I become interested in aesthetics and spectacle. I began to work on a new series of performances where the focus was on discovering whether the visual spectacle of performance that used the body could generate the same depth of relationship between artist and audience that the one-to-one is so easily able to create and maintain.
Since working in this way I have made three performances in which I explore my body as spectacle. The first was entitled La Petite Mort in which I poured treacle down my naked flesh to an opera score, breaking open strings of pearls at the culmination of the track Mild und Leise from Wagner’s Tristan Und Isolde. This was shown at Battersea Arts Centre and at a number of Bristol performance events. The second was Untitled Performance With Sugar in which I used clingfilm (saran wrap) to attach bags of sugar to my torso, before slicing these open with a serrated kitchen knife to give the effect of sugar spilling from my body. Both of these works are still very much in the developmental stage and may be used as material for further development.
The third work in this series was created with Aberystwyth (Wales) based performance Gareth Llyr Evans and after a successful work in progress event was commissioned to be shown at the opening of the 2010 Inbetween Time Festival in Bristol. This work was the most visual and visceral of my performances so far, exploring play, pleasure, spit and disgust through the spitting, swallowing and secretion of coloured spit transferred from mouth to mouth.
I am very interested in the idea of “The Body As Spectacle” and this may inform future solo practice and collaboration.
