I’ve been a working artist, curator, community activist and teacher for more than 25 years, creating and producing intimate solo performances, large-scale public happenings, socially engaged interventions and performance art workshops and lectures. My practice extends across black boxes and white cubes, art fairs and subway stations, international festivals, and single bathroom stalls. I’ve operated an artist-run newsstand in a vacant subway station kiosk, a soup kitchen for artists, a breast milk tasting bar, and a performance festival hub for kids. I’m forever inspired by the rebel queers, renegade witches, and other dyke moms I run with, and bound to many brilliant artists, activists, spell-casters and healers. For many years I made performances that drew from my own experiences of trauma and transformation, intimacy and motherhood. More recently, I’ve experienced a shift in my practice, where my attention has turned to wider theoretical questions about the nature of performance itself to ask questions about when, where, how we perform - in theatres and galleries, on social media, and in our everyday lives.
My work is multidisciplinary, installation-based, and performative, exploring notions of the domestic and the urban through the intimate (or public) matters of living together; personal care and household maintenance; wellness and well-being; and the effects of globalization and technological development upon living space. Propelled by narrative, installations probe issues of social discomfort and our cultural obsession with cleanliness; the methods through which society sanitizes women; our desire for quick-fix methods of self-help and self-care; and the increasing invisibility of technological infrastructure in the urban and domestic landscape.
I have recently been the societal tendency to position the figure of the Child as representative of “the future” – a reliance on reproductive futurism - and the problems of this representation for those who choose not to reproduce or cannot reproduce. I’m interested in positioning issues of social reproduction alongside those of biological reproduction and exploring the notion of reproductive futurity alongside the neoliberal characteristic of cleanliness as generating a forward-facing pathway. I’m interested in deconstructing notions of “the future” and asking questions about ideas of care in relation to reproductive futurity and the drive for technological “innovation”.
Taking the bodily, medical and performative contents that make up my artistic practice, I use my own orchestrated experiences of medical tourism procedures as a public platform to encourage discussion about the cultural, political and social meanings assigned to the female body and its capabilities. The bodily interventions include tubal ligation in Thailand, hymenoplasty in Poland, IVF consultations in Bulgaria and full breast tattoos in Latvia. I believe that upholding the high status of motherhood and treating childfree people as deviations from the standard of motherhood is clearly limiting to childfree women in terms of their acceptance as valuable contributors to the society and as people free of biological determinism. The aim of my artistic research is to contribute to the growing field of investigation in the childfree lifestyle and to question the standard of the normativity of motherhood for women in the Western society and to link the social stigmatization of childfree people with investigations in sociology, performativity, bioethics, body art, feminism and queer theory.
The Next Thing, Bury Art Museum and Sculpture Centre, Moving Image Gallery, Bury, UK