Performances

I have made about 220 live performances over the past 20 plus years. Performance for me is not a theatrical experience. It is akin instead to a shamanic process of image making except one uses the body as a tool instead of a brush or camera. Performances tend to be durational and evolve throughout time incorporating painting, writing, slow motion movements, balance motions, music, spoken word or sound making, etc… I have given performances throughout the World and the list of venues and countries is too numerous and diverse to form any tangible reflection of my activities. Finally, the images are all that remain in photographic documentation and these serve as triggers for an unreliable memory to ponder.

• Categories:
• Archive,
• ...once removed...,
• Painting from performances,
• Come to Pass,
• Slope to Quad,
• Drawn from scratch.
• Performance at the PS2 Gallery.
• 'Netherwhat'.
• 'The Eldritch Thrall'.
• The Wunderkammer.
• Hinterland.
• Deviations of Nature.

Archive

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...once removed...

Seven hour performance installation
Trace Installation Gallery Cardiff Wales
The Cat Show March 17th 2007

This was my first live performance for a period of 7 years. I had a year and a half to plan and ferment the idea of the performance, which was a part of a huge international festival of performance art in the United Kingdom. The Trace Gallery is unique (possibly in the world) in that it only presents the work of time based artists. The Director, Andre Stitt, invited me to use the gallery space and knew my work from the 1980’s and 90’s and encouraged me to re-evaluate my position. My performance used real ice age fossil animal teeth, sculptures made from found materials and objects, powder pigment, a curious enclosure made from sticks and tape (upon which I stuck many poems, drawings and words ). It also included the balancing of a large pole on my head tied to which, were fetish objects that resembled worms or foetal forms. A soundtrack composed by brownsierra, of ice cracking and machines whirring and chiming played continuously for 7 hours. The performance is a mesmeric ritual journey through time with images suggesting vast time cycles and ancient cosmic ceremonial actions. I stopped making performances because I became bored with it. I can only make a performance now if I really feel I have to and I have no interest in becoming a stereotype or parody of the arena known as live art. True originality exists far away from the hubbub of the self conscious masturbation that is dressed up as the so-called “shocking “avant -garde.

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Painting from performances

These gouache and acrylic paintings were rapidly made after a performance in 2000. I often prefer to fill an entire book of handmade Indian rag paper a day or two after a live situation. This crystallizes or captures a fleeting image from a performance that I have been evoking (sometimes working with for years). the pictures are not intended to be resolved or polished and are seldom for display or exhibition. I see them as private automatic events. The use of foam heads, masks and dolls populate the imagery in these paintings which were executed in a raw and visceral manner with undiluted pigments on unprimed paper in attempt to get down some atavistic element of the performance. Where as photographs record an interpretation of a performance (according to the skill and imagination of the photographer) a painting is an iconic fragment encapsulating the physicality and urgency of a live action. The use of colour - red, black, yellow is consistent in many of my performances. This is idiosyncratic and reflects the mood or tempo of a piece. I am frequently drawn to strong emotive colours. I am working to some extent in a conscious expressionistic aesthetic with these images. Other painted images are abbreviations from performance imagery and feed off one another.

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Come to Pass

An 8 hour non stop performance/installation at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff - part of Experimentica 08 Festival of Live Art.I created an environment using clay, red ochre pigment, sticks, petrified tree fungi, paint and leather skins (which I painted upon and wore). The performance utlised an old wash room that had not been modernised or decorated for many years. The space was long and narrow with many windows, some of which I painted over the panes and etched or drew onto with an engraving needle and my fingernails. For long periods I balanced a very heavy wooden tree branch on my head, which acted as a sort of pendulum and controlled my breathing, pace and movements throughout the performance. A series of drawings on table tops in wet paint indicated the passage of hours rather like tree rings record years. I made other paintings on paper sheets fixed to the walls, with pure iron oxide. Photographs by Anna Hillman.

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Slope to Quad

An 8 hour non stop performance at tactileBOSCH, Llandaff North, Cardiff. October 14^th 2008. The performance took place in an irregularly shaped small red lit room at the top of the 200 year old laundry building which is now an arts centre in Cardiff. I worked with the body to create a physical landscape of painted and drawn imagery. A continuous soundtrack of disembodied voices, animal sounds, and bubbling water added to the performance an " underworld " atmospheric. These photographs were taken by the photographer, Kim Fielding.

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Drawn from scratch

The National Review of Live Art, Glasgow, 14^th and 15^th February 2009. A performance over 2 days in 2 parts. Drawing in a trance induced state. Drawing with coloured light reflected from hand mirrors. Drawing with shadows in red/green. I made 105 drawings on scraps of paper. Performance soundtrack composed by brownsierra and GSB. Photographs by Beth Greenhalgh.

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Performance at the PS2 Gallery

A selection of photographs from my recent performance in Belfast at PS2 Gallery. Images by Faye Rossi.

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Performance Images: 'Netherwhat'

Performance installation shots by Anna Hillman.

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Performance Images: 'The Eldritch Thrall'

Photographs taken by Julius Beltrame, of the recent performance with brownsierra, 'The Eldritch Thrall', at the Glassworks, Tactile Bosch, Llandaff North, Wales, on November 14th 2009.

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The Wunderkammer

National Review of Live Art 30, The Arches, Glasgow, March 21st 2010.

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Hinterland

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