52° 36′ 9.1″ N

first half of a short film entitled 52° 36′ 9.1″ N, 1° 25′ 19.5″ exploring the inscription of trauma through site. the site in hand, an aqueduct in rural Leicestershire, seems to exist as barely more than a set of co-ordinates. i found no records of its history and so i intersected my own with historical details of local areas connected to the canal. i returned to the site for the first time since the trauma to take back the memory, sending poems in bottles through the water, recording this action and the ephemera i found there.

lost touch

‘A Dream which must not have been my own, but in which I was captive. Was I a participant, or was I the dream itself – another’s dream, a dream about another?’ – Luce Irigaray, ‘And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other’

a short film which attempts to inscribe the subject of a dream, which was recorded in my mother’s dream diary prior to my birth, through the poetics of gesture and visuality. in order to synthesize the impossibility of textual dream narration with the possibility of a performative reiteration, i worked with corporeal mimicry in order to create a film which sculpts the symbolic subject of the child in relation to its mother, as described in my mother’s dream diary. i conceived the filmic reproduction of the dream in relation to Jacques Lacan’s “mirror stage” and Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray’s (re)readings of it, in an attempt to critique the deliberated psychoanalytic moment when the child is forced to break from its mother, which the dream in hand effectively describes. through the performance of a ritualistic choreography i attempted to represent a phenomenological reflection on the breakdown of the illusionistic space shared by mother and child.

text project

tell me about you in 5 texts to: 07783264765 for your own text poem. click here for more details!

i’ve been busy sticking these up in telephone boxes around Bloomsbury. doing the same in Wandsworth today with the help of HD. more on this soon, but for now, a few photos:

52° 36′ 9.1″ N, 1° 25′ 19.5″ W book

finished these little books last night, which will soon be paired with a short film on DVD.

in these poems i was exploring the inscription of trauma through site. the site in hand, an aqueduct in rural Leicestershire, seems to exist as barely more than a set of co-ordinates. i found no records of its history and so i intersected my own with historical details of local areas connected to the canal. a week ago i returned for the first time since – what i have been calling “a traumatic event” – what i am uncomfortable calling “a rape” – and so will refer to as “a sexual assault”. i documented what i found and the ephemera i took there.

i came to remember, to recall details and remind the place of this event in its history, but i felt as if the place had been waiting for me, had remembered me and was cleansed by it. i didn’t need to remember any more.

this isn’t about salvation, though there was a transformation. it, the sexual assault, states itself subtly as little more than the presence of the poems in glass bottles i sent through the water. the bottles could be melting into new bottles, or in the Thames, or even in the ocean by now.

Public Property book

gone 5am and i’ve just returned from the postbox, sending these off to participants:

(cat not included)

inside the book:

am going to set up the shop by the end of the month when i’ll have a lot more little bits and pieces. now to sleepzzz

52° 36′ 9.1″ N, 1° 25′ 19.5″ W (in progress) part one

52° N

Ashby
from ash trees

they were smoking cigarettes
in nimbus grey
idly sucking on
hot speckled cork
sticking to their lips
and flicking glinting cherries
into the canal

In the 19th century its main industries were ribbon manufacture and leather working.

population today:
cattle and flies

summer sunning leather
his jacket wrinkled
and winced around his limbs
sweating crevices
squinting flesh
as he tugged at the ribbons
banding my wrists

The Canal was abandoned in stages between 1944 and 1966 and the British Railways withdrew the passenger service and closed the station in September 1964.

nobody comes now
but dogs and walkers

nobody witnessed
when the sun
lanced the water
reflecting two girls
two men
on a towpath
at the end of the day

this black hole of feminism

let’s put this elephant to bed:

for most of my writing life i have easily accepted that feminism is always present and never the focus of my work. it isn’t that i’m not interested in feminism, and actually most of my critical work references major feminist thinkers, especially Kristeva, Irigaray and Cixous. politically and personally, i am upset by gender inequality, so i suppose i am a feminist. there, i said it. but current activism upsets me just about as much as gender inequality, perhaps because they are the same thing.

for example: i went on Slutwalk last summer and thought it was a fascinating idea – with obvious problems – but acts of reclamation are (in my opinion) always essential for positive change. it wasn’t the concept i found myself being critical of, it was the complete and utter shunning of men. the event was meant to be in protest against victim blaming, yet not one of the many speakers at the rally included men when speaking about victims of sexual assault, and every single time the word “offender” was mentioned, it was succeeded by masculine pronouns. the few men who turned up to the event, some of them presumably victims of sexual assault, were completely ignored and generalized as offenders. Slutwalk wasn’t against victim blaming, it was against the blaming of women. this upset me politically as in my ignorance i still believed feminism was about gender equality, and it upset me personally as i was sexually assaulted by a girl in my teens.

this is just one of many encounters i’ve had with so-called feminism, and is why these days i am very reluctant to associate myself with feminism even – or especially – in my work. i appreciate that the history is clear: men oppressed women and we still live in a patriarchal society. but when reading some particularly aggressive feminist texts in the final year of my BA, i sided with the men in my class who were shunned for saying that they felt upset that these texts generalized all men as offenders, and therefore oppressed them as men had oppressed women before.

these are all very basic points on feminism that have been raised and experienced by others countless times before. but this is about feminism in my work – i suppose in any work, but i’m talking specifically about mine for the time being. as a woman continually making work around identity and the self, feminist ideas seep into just about every piece i produce. i acknowledge this quietly, drawing on feminist theory in my essays and referencing artists who were at the forefront of so-called feminist art – Marina Abramovic and Joan Jonas et al. i have enormous respect for these artists and am lucky enough to have tutors who still include them in reading lists. but there is always this same question raised in relation to feminist art and feminism in general: it has been done now, why does it need to be done again? are women not still oppressed? are men not still paid more than women? do we not still have to pay tax on our sanitary products? well i don’t, as i use a mooncup, but it is generally accepted that gender inequality is still prevalent.

if feminism still exists, then feminist art still exists, and art is never original. the idea that an element in communicating a message has been used before and therefore cannot be used again is just silly. painting would have been a fleeting craze in the caveman era and Duchamp would have nowhere to put his urinal except his bathroom. i use my body in my work – and Yoko Ono used her body in her work in the 1960′s – but that doesn’t mean our work is communicating the same message, or even that the same message doesn’t need to be iterated. i mostly use my body in relation to identity and the self – which doesn’t mean i can obliviate the feminist ideas that are historically engrained in using the body in art – but it is certainly not the focus of my work.

i continue to make work using many techniques which were originally used to communicate feminist ideas, but i am not consciously making feminist work, although to reiterate, there are certainly some feminist ideas within my work. however, every single time i present my work to an academic audience the majority of the critical theory suggested to me is feminist theory, and the majority of ideas or problems that are raised by critics are in relation to feminism. this may be because i am taught by women who would call themselves feminists, or it may be that my work is actually feminist work and i am misunderstanding feminism, or misunderstanding my own work and what it communicates. but i am constantly frustrated by the absolute inability for my critics to suggest criticism, problems and ideas that are not related to feminism. of course, by my own admission i am making work about identity and the self – and as i am a woman this is inevitably tied to feminism – but there are so many other links that seem to pass by completely unnoticed or unacknowledged.

so i find myself balancing precariously on this critical precipice, where if i admit any idea into a work that is in any way related to feminism, the entirity of my work falls into this black hole of feminism where every element of it is perceived through a feminist distortion. if i stave away from these ideas, which is in itself probably impossible, i would be fighting a resistance against my own politics and sacrificing an element of myself – which, as i make work about identity and the self – would destroy the base philosophy of my work.

i jokingly considered making work under a male pseudonym, joining the ranks of female artists and authors who were oppressed and forced into anonymity prior to the twentieth century. but aside from this being a vague possibility for a creative project, it’s completely unviable in every other way. for the first time in my life i fleetingly wished i had been born male. i feel like i’m being shunned because of my gender, and in an extreme and ridiculous twist it is feminism that is making me feel this way. i have no real choice but to continue scaling in circles as far as possible from the skirts of this black hole of feminism, and hope that one day the most important ideas in my work will not be passed over simply because i am a woman. i am still not going to stop taking my clothes off, and i am still not going to define this as feminism.