Performing Things

I make performances using space, time, the body — and sometimes things — as materials. These performances attempt, through a personal and embodied investigation of these materials, to explore an intimacy with the viewer that engages with questions of individual and collective identity. My current work includes performative acts or gestures that evolve through a phenomenological process of inquiry. The work aims to challenge the ways we relate to each other physically, emotionally and conceptually inside the spaces we occupy in order to create moments of tangible engagement with each other. Through my art work, I am interested in finding a means to open up family histories, everyday experience and cultural and socio-political perspectives between the viewer and the artwork, in order to explore how this exchange can shift our interaction with the world, offering new ways of seeing and identification. As a form of research, the artwork investigates how the act of interpretation can draw the viewer into a performed reception, attempting to make essential the complex social relationships that exist in a shared space through activating what the viewer’s ‘part’ or ‘role’ is in relation to a work. To this end, my working processes include promoting an intimacy through reversing spatial relationships, using performance and the body to encourage an embodied response and drawing upon narrative conventions, such as metaphor, to further an interpretation that supports an intersubjective engagement in order to deepen the opportunity for the viewer to perform their own meaning in their reception of a work. Influenced by Merleau-Ponty’s theories of bodily perception, Claire Bishop’s writing on the physical relationship between art and viewer and Amelia Jones’ ideas on representation of the performed body and its role in meaning production, my research attempts to understand how we can create definite connections with the viewer through our shared attention to a work. As such, artists Tino Sehgal and Sophie Calle have been influences inside my practice.