week six

PROJECT:

This week I have been feeling silent. The performances that I have been doing have been very movement orientated and I been feeling stunted not using my voice or words in my work. Although it has been empowering to move my body and to do things without having to overthink or justify them.

I have had an idea brewing in my mind for a while: to make poems (or more like non poems, which is what they ended up being) by using my performance as the props for my words. I wanted to make these poems to provoke more thought around my performance, as a sort of reflective exercise.

The poems I ended up creating were how I felt about myself this week, and I wrote these pieces in a very calculated way, which created a sort of conflict between the spontaneity of my movement performances that I did in week five when I paired both together. I think this conflict reflects the sort of cognitive dissonance that I have been experiencing (pretty much all my teenage and adult life) about the male gaze and desirability. I feel like the performance represents my want to both break free and perform for the patriarchy. My writing represents my desperation to be loved by the male gaze but my want to tell it to go fuck itself also.

A lot of anger came out as I wrote and it felt extremely natural to be writing about my frustration. I like the feeling of being angry in a controlled way, it makes me feel powerful.

I studied the work of Barbara Kruger , as she shows women as commodities and uses words to express her anger at the patriarchy. I feel like I draw a parallel with Kruger’s work, as both our works have a graphic quality. I really enjoyed manipulated the image, it felt like I was graffitiing the world, like I had control to decorate the space around me how I felt fit. I think these pieces would be good to show in the Takeover exhibition, especially along side a film installation or live performance as some added context to my project.