I'm interested in the messy reality of female experience and using storytelling (in material, performance, or text forms) as a radical act against the oppression of shame silencing that reality. Female desire. Motherhood. Shame. The 'hysterical.' How these narratives play out in dating and communication. The slipperiness of language: the gap between what is said and intuited. Performative modes of communication. Technologised forms of communication. Millennial miscommunications and misinterpretations. The limitations, and the inexhautability of language. Intimacy. Disclosure. Things revealed and concealed. Notions of 'sharing.' Intimate exchanges. Sharing as performance. Confessions. Autobiography. Infiltrating public spaces and virtual space as a performative modes of storytelling. The notion of 'truth'. The impermanence v permanence of performance / material / text. Documenting and arresting time (materially or in text). Using chance, combined with a predefined set of rules as a limiting structure. Asking questions. Following instructions. Obsessive, repetitive acts. Endurance performance as process that challenge the physical - or mental - limits of the artist. Emotions as critical matter. The personal as political….

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Lockdownlovestories

Lockdown is potentially incredibly isolating, but the most isolating emotional of all is shame. Lockdownlovestories is participatory art project & website that invites people to anonymously submit their true stories of how lockdown is affecting their love life. Aiming to de-shame the realities of love and dating in lockdown by anonymously revealing the true intimate stories of strangers, de-stigmatising by revealing to normalise. Since the websites launch on 7th May more than 400 stories have been published on the site and the project has been featured on BBC Radio London, Grazia, The Metro, Ham & High and Camden New Journal.

To read more about the project, submit your story and read all the stories visit the site HERE. 

Instagram: @lockdown_lovestories

Artemis Encumbered, 2020, performance

As a woman, after a certain age, your fertility feels like a time bomb. Every month a gamble. If you want kids: Can I delay another month, another year, for my career, or will I run out of time? Do I want another child? Is this my last chance? How can I be everything I want to this imaginary child and also to myself? Your fertility becomes a privilege and a burden. 

Dressed as the multi-breasted goddess of fertility, I invite the audience to pop my balloons, releasing my milk – my fertility. With each pop I become more abject, but I am also able to move more freely. 

 Below still image from performance and video document of performance

OH BABY, 2020

Oh Baby, 2020, endurance performance-sculpture, 12 hours of the artist’s exhalations captured in 1000 balloons, dimensions variable, Chelsea Cookhouse Gallery

For 12 hours I capture each of my exhalations in pink balloons. Each balloon contains five exhalations. A self-portrait and a document of time and space, I extend my body into the space around me and use my breathe to create. The balloons become surrogate off-springs, evocative of the body and stretched skin. Their act of creation alluding to pregnancy, reproduction, breastfeeding, the giving away of the self to create, and the repetitive menial tasks and intense physical endurance of early motherhood. For the final minutes of the performance my daughter joined me, seated on my lap, silently passing me the final balloons to inflate.

Mad Girls Love Song, 2019, Performance Art Novel & Spoken Word Performance

‘We are mad girls and we feel too much, and stories like these don’t end well for us….

Starting in October 2018 I went on a year long journey of discovery. But not into myself. Into my old phones and emails. To retrieve old text messages. To work out what happened with us. I made it my mission to understand. What do you do when you have questions but no one will answer them for you: I visited tarot readers, played with white magic, consulted google, interviewed friends. For a year I embodied this position. I pushed my memory to its limits. I scrutinised, analysed. I wrote 80,000 words and once I was done, I wrote this spoken word piece: this is my Mad Girl's Love Song….

An extract from a performance of Mad Girls’ Love Song performed live at Chelsea College of Art Studio Show, November 2019

Conversation Between My Old & New Self, 2019, Video, 5 mins 25 secs

What does it mean to make art once you become a mother, to chose to leave your child to create something that may never be seen? What does becoming a mother mean for your identity? Who even are you anymore? You’re everything I feared becoming. I always knew you’d be like this… My old self and my new self battle it out in a verbal show down.

With visual reference to Tracey Emin’s video art work, The Conversation, 2000, and Conversation With My Mum, 2001, in which Emin explores the decision as an artist and woman to not have children, In Conversation Between My Old and New Self, I explore the less spoken about –but no less complex and contentious – reality of the effect of having children on the self and identity of a female artist.