A short one off performance devised in 24 hours for a group showcase at the Rag Factory on 14th December 2012. All diegetic audio and video was sampled from the BBC news at 10 from the previous day. The mask, nipple covers and skirt were also constructed from strips of newspapers from the previous day. The performance centered on the fetishishism of information, logorrheic identification of news-worthy individuals and more generally the ephemerality inherent in what we call “the news”…
canvas, paint, transfer paper, linen laid white paper, white card, ink, glue and white thread
Case Study is a dialectical practice in translation between textuality and tactility through self narration, which exemplifies a selection of Freud’s antiquities and case studies as triggers for the enactment of mnemic tracing and symbolic (re)presentations of the physical and psychical self. In order to explore the psychoanalytic process from the position of both the couch and the chair, the majority of textual and tactile materials originate from my own collection of personal artefacts, diaries, correspondence and psychiatric assessments. Case Study is cited if not sited in the Freud Museum, envisaged as a work that Freud could simultaneously read, analyse and caress.
(a note on Freud)
Freud’s father was a textile dealer and he himself also came to collect rugs among other antiquities, one of which still decorates his famous couch upon which patients reclined to be psychoanalyzed. The bulk of Freud’s collection may be organized into two divisions: books and sculptures, or alternatively, textual and tactile. Freud’s allegiance to the word is commonly discussed and is evident in both his library and his collection of antiquities, which share little aesthetic consistency besides their mythological iconography. His haptic habits are not widely known, though over two thousand antiquities decorate his study in his preserved final home, now the Freud Museum, London. Few antiquities reside behind glass, a vast number stand upon his desk and Freud is known to have frequently greeted and caressed his favourite figures with familiarity while he worked. The psychoanalytic process performed by Freud may therefore be described in textual and tactile terms as follows: the untouchable analysand reclines on a covered couch and provides free associative material for the analyst who, unseen by the analysand, weaves the material into a coherent self narrative, which is then restored to the analysand, after which the analyst returns to his desk to caress anthropomorphic figures and transcribe the self narrative as a case study.
(tracing paper, plain paper, ink and white thread)
52° 36′ 9.1″ N, 1° 25′ 19.5″ W attempts to inscribe the site of a personal trauma through a textual and visual narrative which oscillates between confessional, historical and geographical details. In response to both the characteristics of the site and the nature of traumatic memories, the narrative is elliptic and centripetal. I utilized text and visuals as veils that overwrite the site to produce a palimpsest in both content and form, through which the site and the traumatic event are continually pointed toward and yet never quite reached. To date 52° 36′ 9.1″ N, 1° 25′ 19.5″ W takes the form of a bookwork and video.
The site of the traumatic event is an aqueduct in rural Leicestershire that is unnamed, unlisted and unmarked even on the map of the canal that is displayed there. The site is located ambivalently inside the memory and as the physical manifestation of the memory. The site is a redundant space that now functions only for recreational purposes, namely boating and dog walking. The site is a transitional and perchance heterotopic space, which Foucault describes as
an extraordinary bundle of relations because it is something through which one goes, it is also something by means of which one can go from one point to another, and then it is also something that goes by. (Foucault, Of Other Spaces)
52° 36′ 9.1″ N, 1° 25′ 19.5″ W attempts to reflect this heterotopic ‘bundle of relations’ linguistically and thematically as the references were collated from diverse sources in fields such as geography, botany, Shakespeare, military uniform and dictionary definitions, which are all drawn from aspects of local history, geography and architecture. The resultant text intersects with confessional details of the traumatic event, oscillating between the literal, the symbolic and the seemingly unrelated.
(curated and photographed by Selina Mayer with additional photographs by Lorrianne Clark)
bookwork
card, recycled brown paper, tracing paper, yellow paper, photographs, ink, black thread and Dymo label
Public Property explores notions of authorship, ownership and mutuality through a performance in which the absence of voice was supplanted by the presence of a complicit body, which was in turn transformed into a vessel for the voices, identities and wills of the audience involved. In conceiving the performance, I solicited proposals from friends on social networking sites and subsequently assigned a meeting place and a time slot in which participants were to borrow me, as a silent and complicit body, for their purposes. In exchange for lending myself to others I was permitted use of all documentation created by them for the purpose of the resultant bookwork, which attempts to represent the crossovers between authorship, ownership and mutuality as explored within the performance. Public Property critiques our desire for passive objects in conflict with the trust, consent and collaboration required in an interactive performance removed from the social boundaries of galleries and theatres.
‘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’)
‘Dream #2’ is the second part of an ongoing series of work with my mother’s dream diary from 1984-1985. The video works with corporeal mimicry and ritualistic choreography to sculpt the symbolic subject of the child in relation to its mother as described simultaneously in my mother’s dream diary and frequently in psychoanalysis, namely Lacan’s “mirror stage”. The video attempts to illustrate the symbolic breakdown of the illusionistic space shared by mother and child prior to the mirror stage in addition to exploring the impossibility of textual dream narration and the problem of framing subjecthood in relation to the mother/child relationship as theorized by Kristeva and Irigaray.
‘Text’ explores the transformation of the everyday, using text messaging as the focal point due to it being the most widely used data application in the world, which situates the text as arguably the most common source of communicative written text in contemporary everyday life. In addition, the text message is essentially disposable: text messages are cheap, short, and most frequently function as a communicative forum for momentary thoughts or other information to be shared and then discarded. This temporal characteristic of the text messages is explored in ‘Text’ through the public distribution of posters in low quality print on A4 paper which resemble the flyers posted in telephone boxes. Furthermore, text messages are read almost exclusively on trains, tubes, cafes; hence, the transference from the small, private screen to the comparatively large, public, tactile object emphasises the inherent impersonality of text messaging as a communicative tool. The presence of the original texts, the transparency of the writing procedure and the invitation for the reader to participate in the project by text messaging their own words for use in another poster, together contribute to the blurring between the source and the work. The valueless text message is thus reactivated through reproduction of the private into the public.
string, masking tape, red balloon, ink and used condoms
‘Balloons’ was the beginning of an abandoned project on the semantics of unseen objects and was composed for a workshop on word + image in response to selected paintings by Ed Ruscha and Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document.
‘Yellow’ explores various aspects of aphasia and aphasia treatment through the overlaying of looped suction microphone recordings of humming on the chest and neck, a recording of a female voice repeating seemingly arbitrary words, a contact microphone recording of tapping on a wooden table and a low-quality silent video depicting a close-up of a miming mouth. These ostensibly abstract layers intersect each other in an attempt to spawn a discourse on what it is to voice, what speech is in its primal state, the struggle to voice, and the means employed in order to return the ability to voice. The layering of suction microphone recordings reflects the physical process of voice; the chest was recorded as the intercostal muscles control breathing required for the production of voice, and also the front of the neck as the tightening of vocal chords produces vocal sound.
The effect of aphasia on speech often leads to a telegraphic style of speech, which is reflected in ‘Yellow’ through the erasure of all words bar nouns, which are replaced with words from the WWI Royal Navy phonetic alphabet (the first practiced phonetic alphabet in English), which correspond to the first letter of each word. One of the few treatments available to severe aphasia is Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT), which aims to improve expressive language through the use of the preserved function of singing. One of the first stages of this treatment is humming, which is begun by the therapist who taps the patient’s hand with the syllables of song lyrics whilst humming the melody of a song known to the patient. ‘Yellow’ may thus be described as an aphasic cover of ‘Yesterday’ by the Beatles, whereby ‘Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away’ becomes ‘yellow Tommy’.
O reappropriates fragmented depictions of “mad” women from diverse sources in exploration of the role of the document in producing or confirming identity and the complex politics of masculinised psychoanalytical language. The act of reappropriating material from Josef Breuer’s case study of “Anna O” (AKA Bertha Pappenheim), passages in Hamlet relating to Shakespeare’s Ophelia and my own psychiatric assessments from 2000-2010 complicates the relationships between author and self, analyst and analysand, public and private, through a practice in authorial displacement. The composition of the text involved a restraint method whereby every word was digitally erased with the exception of all quotations, the appearances of second person feminine pronouns (“she”, “her”), and the subsequent 3 words in each case. If a proper noun was included in those 3 words it too was erased, whilst all original punctuation remained intact.
