My practise
is a process of integrating sculptural ideas with the live body and
recording this in both live performance and video formats. The best
way I have found to achieve this amalgamation is to make my intial
sculptural ideas into objects which form 3.D. sketches. From these
ieces I formulate ideas for live performance. After staging the live
piece I review it through ananlysing the documentation and feed back
from the audience. This enables me to isolate small actions that become
the focus of my video work. Through making these subsequent video
pieces I have found that re-contextualising my movements through framing
and focus refines them and leads to further spontaneity. I am interested
in how cestain body parts have meaning attached to them and how this
can be re-written through the addition of secondary materials, the
movement of the given body part upon, through and with that material.
Hence my work often focuses on a very specific part of the body, the
foot for example or the neck. The secondary materials that I have
chosen to explore with the live body, have similar sticky adhesive
qualities to them. Such as treacle, blue tack, lemonade and plasters.
By experimenting with a greater or lesser amount of the material in
contact with the body I explore the restriction or unfamiliar body
movement that can be achieved with these materials. George Bataille's
essay, 'The Big Toe' is descriptive towards the essential intentions
of my work, Bataille writes of The Big Toe: 'Human life entails, infact
the rage of seeing oneself as a back and forth movement from refuse
to the ideal, and from the ideal to refuse - a rage that is easily
directed against an organ as base as the foot.' Through the addition
of secondary objects I aim to engage with these poetics, investigating
it, questioning it, effectively building on the myths of certain effortless
ways of movement.