biography
Over the past decade my performance, installation and video work has begun to explore the limits and boundaries of my physical control and endurance. through a series of melancholic, often visceral performances, ranging from the intimate to the epic, I have attempted to examine the positioning and relationship between performer and audience, questioning notions of true/fictional and performed self, otherness, difference, gender, sex, love, pain, suffering, transcendence and the politics of the body in relation to culture and power
In 2001 I began to devise solo performances starting with The Bachelor Stripped Bare (selected for the NRLA Platform at the New Territories Festival 2002), The performance was described by Robert Ayers in Live Art Magazine as ‘… a wonderfully old-fashioned and self conscious Genetesque apparition … violently transgendering …’ this was followed by Cruising, commissioned by the LIFT Festival Club and broadcast on BBC2 television as part of the cultural history series Taboo – 50 Years of Censorship. Later in 1992 I developed and performed Valentine for The Centre of Attention and collaborated with Ernst Fischer and Helen Spackman on Fallout at the Riverside Studios
In 2003 I performed at Tate Modern with Guillermo Gomez-Pena in Ex Centris: The Museum of Fetishized Identities, described by realtimearts.net as ‘A bit like partying your way through the Apocalypse’; with Oreet Ashery in Central Location for Wonderyears at the NGBK Gallery, Berlin and at Visions of Excess an ‘ … eighteen hour voyage into the heart of darkness …’ staged in the Demon lap dancing club and curated by Ron Athey and Vaginal Davis for the Fierce!
In 2004 I performed at the ICA with the International Necronautical Society (INS) in Calling All Agents. Later that year I was awarded funding from the Arts Council of England to develop a collaborative research project – Bindu Point, with digital media artist Martin Franklin. The resulting performances used trance-state improvisational movement to set in motion generative audio and chaos driven video feedback, to create a constantly evolving immersive environment of swirling electronic drones and images. Bindu Point was performed at the Out There Festival, South Hill Park Arts Centre in July 2004 and more recently for the Sonorities Festival at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Belfast and the 8th International Generative Art Conference in Milan. Video documentation from the first performance of Bindu Point was screened at the ePerformance & Plug-ins Festival, Sydney and the INPORT Video Performance Festival, Tallinn, Estonia 2005
In 2004 I also developed a second collaboration with Ernst Fischer and Helen Spackman; Iconostasis, a multi-media performance for Act 02 at the 291 Gallery, London; and Porca Miseria, commissioned by Duckie for Gay Shame at the Coronet. Later that year I performed a live art intervention as part of Property from the Third Floor for Insight Arts Trust at the Royal Opera House, London
In May 2005 I co-produced the London performances of Ron Athey’s experimental opera The Judas Cradle, at 291 Gallery, part of a national tour commissioned by Fierce! and funded by The Arts Council of England
In June 2005 I was commissioned to make a new solo performance The Mark of Cain for Club Underworld in Athens