At the heart of all my solo work lurks the female presence to be unpicked, unraveled, scrutinized and laid bare. I preoccupy myself with her intricacies, the minute details of her character, her complexity and her contradictions. I unearth her multiple narratives and externalize her interior depths.
The female presences that haunt my solo performances are inspired by wide ranging influences mostly drawn from female/feminist histories but also from my own autobiographical history. The female is represented in my work through a layered bricolage of intertextually contructed references to the multiple representations of women in classic film and literature, contemporary artworks, installations, fashion design.
The process of creating my solo performance always begins with the creation of a text. The text is formed and shaped from a string of disjointed sentences, phrases and images, collated together from a diverse range of influences: my own memory, a film I watched last week, or an image found on the back of a magazine. As I shape and curate these disjointed fragments together I try to find this female presence’s voice, and through this melange of words try to carve out her dialogue. I will often find her voice during rushes of automatic writing or speaking random thoughts aloud in the dark confines of the rehearsal rooms – where she arrives half formed, unfinished.
Perhaps it can’t be avoided but its true to say that the process of writing I engage in when constructing this work is largely auto-ethnographic, as such the writing is self reflective of my own obsessions, fantasies, fears and thoughts..
In the process of making a show I find myself fixated on certain objects that I come by: piles of unsealed envelopes, a miniature dolls house, a red dress, a mirror… These objects tend to remind me of something of my childhood – or of my childhood fantasies, or perhaps more likely of the myth of childhood and our romanticized aspirations of becoming woman.
The female presences that haunt my solo performances are inspired by wide ranging influences mostly drawn from female/feminist histories but also from my own autobiographical history. The female is represented in my work through a layered bricolage of intertextually contructed references to the multiple representations of women in classic film and literature, contemporary artworks, installations, fashion design.
The process of creating my solo performance always begins with the creation of a text. The text is formed and shaped from a string of disjointed sentences, phrases and images, collated together from a diverse range of influences: my own memory, a film I watched last week, or an image found on the back of a magazine. As I shape and curate these disjointed fragments together I try to find this female presence’s voice, and through this melange of words try to carve out her dialogue. I will often find her voice during rushes of automatic writing or speaking random thoughts aloud in the dark confines of the rehearsal rooms – where she arrives half formed, unfinished.
Perhaps it can’t be avoided but its true to say that the process of writing I engage in when constructing this work is largely auto-ethnographic, as such the writing is self reflective of my own obsessions, fantasies, fears and thoughts..
In the process of making a show I find myself fixated on certain objects that I come by: piles of unsealed envelopes, a miniature dolls house, a red dress, a mirror… These objects tend to remind me of something of my childhood – or of my childhood fantasies, or perhaps more likely of the myth of childhood and our romanticized aspirations of becoming woman.
