Collaborator Wish List

This is my desert island wish list, excluding friends or any actual collaborations past, present or future.

1. Adam Cooper, dancer
2. If not the above then Anton du Beke
3. Ben Drew aka Plan B
4. Or Paloma Faith?  I'd have to meet them both to make the final decision.
5. Forced Entertainment
6. Rose English (I'd just be her apprentice)


This list broadly takes in my perception that I think I could actually work with these people.  I haven't included visual artists because if I love their work, then I'd just be assisting them, or being a fan around them.  I genuinely interested in the idea of making artwork from people outside my own art bubble.

Actually, I really like working with other people, and I'd love to work closely with dancers, perhaps a showgirl? also, I'd love do something in a theatre setting, so perhaps a writer too?

Right, well, let's see what Santa brings from that lot...

New Work

Wow, this year is hurtling to an end.  I always feel like I did barely anything over a year, but perception and reality are strange things.  I'm not sure how my year went, I only know what I did not achieve.

I did however have a comforting moment of putting some large new work on the walls of the old S1 Artspace before they moved.  Sadly, only for a meeting with my supervisors and also I stepped in and showed the work to my students in my crit group when the student showing texted me concussed in hospital.  The work is an ongoing pairing of theatre interior and text bios.  The bios are sourced from 1930s cigarette cards or online web presences.  The work represents the public viewing spaces of the showgirl and theorists connected to my research.  The project will be ongoing throughout my PhD.

Reading and Writing (the Problem)

Argh!  A couple of years ago, I felt called upon to really investigate problems my practice threw up (and I mean that phrase).  So I started to write; to articulate my thoughts in written form.  Now, as I undertake this PhD, I read and write regularly.  And the more I know and learn, the more I am embarrassed about anything I have ever written!  Can I believe my own front?!  I've found some lovely articulations of the problems and thoughts I wish to work through, so I shall quote them here.  With great thanks to their author, Craig Owens, whose words here could be re-interpreted into a manifesto.  Perhaps I can get into dialogue with them later.  Or, I need to confront the problem and take up the challenge of the last sentence.

Among those prohibited from Western representation, whose representations are denied all legitimacy, are women.  Excluded from representation by its very structure, they return within it as a figure for—a representation of—the unrepresentable (Nature, Truth, the Sublime etc).  This prohibition bears primarily on woman as the subject, and rarely as the object of representation, for there is certainly no shortage of images of women. [ … ] In order to speak, to represent herself, a woman assumes a masculine position; perhaps this is why femininity is frequently associated with masquerade, with false representation, with simulation and seduction.¹

What can be said about the visual arts in a patriarchal order that privileges vision over the other senses?  Can we not expect them to be a domain of masculine privilege—as their histories indeed prove them to be—a means perhaps, of mastering through representation the “threat” posed by the female?  In recent years there has emerged a visual arts practice informed by feminist theory and addressed, more or less explicitly, to the issue of representation and sexuality. [ … ] [W]omen have begun the long-overdue process of deconstructing femininity.  Few have produced new, “positive” images of a revised femininity; to do so would simply supply and thereby prolong the life of the existing representational apparatus.²

1. Craig Owens (1992) Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press pp 166-190, p.170.

2. Ibid p.180.