ARTIST / CURATOR
ARTIST / CURATOR
ARTIST CURATOR
EARLY PERFORMANCE WORKS
CLOCK 1989/90 MUSEUM OF MODERN ART Oxford. Also Vibourg Denmark & Malmö Sweden
A participatory performance work made first in Denmark and Sweden in 1989, commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art Oxford in 1990. Twelve women from the local community, of differing ages & nationalities were invited to take part in a series of workshops to make a live work for the museum. Their personal experiences & understandings, actions & words contributed to a work reflecting on the potency of the mother/daughter relationship.
Actions included writing a secret diary on the underside of one of twelve identical tables, making images with an 'umbilical' of string, writing a letter to a child and nursing an infant.
Sounds, personal to the women, lullabies or chants resonant of their experience of mothering or of being mothered, were sung in their own tongue.
The 'clock' was a mechanism wound by human feeling & set in motion by it's release, it's concerns the action & interaction of memory & emotion.
The inter-relationships of maternity, womanhood and infancy were bound in it's movement and enacted in remembered gestures.
The work ended with the stacking of the twelve tables, each with the word 'Mother' written on it in the different languages of the performers and tied to it the pink ribbon from their hair.
Duration 30 mins
ENDLESS DEVOTION 1990 MUSEUM OF MODERN ART Oxford, SERPENTINE GALLERY London
A work exploring the signs and language of contact and alienation and the often unspoken association and devotion of mother and daughter, one to another.
Two women, a mother and her daughter, faced each other across a sea of 100 dinner plates, signs of a domestic world inhabited by women and shaped by their presence and repetition of touch. Each plate held a heart shaped piece of frozen writing ink, acting as barrier between the two women, yet holding them united too.
Repetitive gestures, intimate and personal to each, acted as semaphores of identity and desire, at times drawing them closer, at others increasing distance between them. Their shared humanity temporarily obscured by their inability to communicate.
The work moved through a series of disjointed emotional postures to an eventual understanding of their common tongue but the frailty of its expression. The hearts of frozen writing ink melted during the piece.
Duration 90 minutes.
AXIS 1991 SERPENTINE GALLERY London
This work was performed by five heavily pregnant mothers-to-be whom the artist knew from attending Active Birth classes in North London whilst pregnant with her second child. The work used the Serpentine Gallery as a physical instrument. Actions and objects described features of duality, differentiated and reunited, coagulated and dissolved in the process of living.
The mothers performed in the West Gallery, in silence making the slow breathing and movements they used as preparation for the birth of their babies. Contributing these gestures of hope and life that they usually did in private, giving voice and visibility to a largely hidden part of the lives of new mothers.
In the East Gallery the audience were confronted by rows of stripped, illuminated globes, forlorn regiments, barren in their lack of colour or description of the world as human kind has claimed and defined it and is now destroying.
The separate energies that existed in the East & West galleries were in counterpoise, using the audience moving between the two as it's fulcrum point.
Duration 30 mins