The grounded body: Performance Art and nature

This brief account focuses on a range of approaches Performance Art in nature. It is not an attempt to give an authorial academic text on this area of practice, rather, an introduction to a few artists, their work and how they explore aspects of the body in, or in relation to, the natural environment

Edge of an Era: Performance Art 1985-90

An Open Access online resource of 1980s UK-based performance art. Edge of an Era revisits a specific series of seminal performance art events from the late 1980s, through artistic commissions, archival digitisation, workshops in London and the North and a public event celebrating the 30th anniversary of EDGE88. Edge of an Era is curated by Helena Goldwater and Rob La Frenais, Alex Eisenberg and Live Art Development Agency, London. It is produced in partnership with Artsadmin and Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, supported using public funding by Arts Council National Lottery Project Grants with additional activities made possible through the Jonathan Ruffer Curatorial Grant from Art Fund

Zim Zum: The Folding World

Document: Pile of Wreckage, sculptural installation for Zim Zum: The Folding World, Patrick Heide Gallery, London 2022. Zim-Zum: The Folding World presents, through twelve international artists, a field of possibilities to be unfolded. There’s the spiritual and conceptual richness in the mystical tradition of the Kabbalah, in which creation occurs through the divine or infinite presence folding away from the centre to make space for new worlds – Zim-Zum is the Hebrew term for that contraction; David Bohm’s scientific world view, which pivots on how 'unfolded' world which we see is folded out of the broader underlying order; and Gilles Deleuze’s related way of undermining the assumption of binaries - such as 'outside/ inside' - which we tend to project onto the world, by proposing that such differences should be viewed more as either side of a fold. Those concepts connect naturally to aesthetic concerns: the natural expectation of repetition which is built into the action of folding, leading in turn to multiplicity, and the intricacy which can develop out of that. The formation of folds can be violent or serene; can collapse or create space – even at the same time. And can relate to how we see the world as well as how it comes into being. There can be an implication of unfolding. Folds can relate to a system or arise from a more spontaneous approach. So welcome to the fold - with Rana Begum, Jyll Bradley, Sophie Bouvier Ausländer, Helena Goldwater, Zarah Hussain, Tania Kovats, Katherine Murphy, Navid Nuur, Reinoud Oudshoorn, Abigail Reynolds, Simon Schubert, Bridget Smith, Samuel Zealey and Beat Zoderer. Zim-Zum: The Folding World is curated by artist Jyll Bradley and art writer Paul Carey-Kent. The exhibition arises from their shared interest in the concept of ‘the fold’ in contemporary art

Glimpses of Before: 1970s UK Performance Art

This is a Study Room Guide which looks at 1970s UK Performance Art. Compiled and edited by Helena Goldwater and produced by the Live Art Development Agency (LADA), this Guide includes framing texts by Helena Goldwater and Dominic Johnson, as well as artists’ information and images, including links to online content and hard copy materials available in LADA’s Study Room, a free, open access research facility specialising in Live Art and Performance. Glimpses of Before forms part of a larger series of research activities on Performance and Politics in the 1970s organised by Dr. Dominic Johnson and Professor Nicholas Ridout of the the Department of Drama at Queen Mary, University of London. This 2015/16 project includes a symposium on Performance and Politics at the Whitechapel Gallery, and two artist residencies by Anne Bean in the Foyle Reading Room at Whitechapel Gallery (London), and Marcia Farquhar in the Archive at ACME Studios (London)

The pleasure of small partings

This seven hour performance installation was made in response to the site of an old school kitchen in South East London. The remaining extractor hood was utilised to hang 7m lengths of hair, which I then spread out across the floor. I cut the hair with tailor’s shears, then separated the hanging hair from the hair on the floor, in order to allow for the concrete area of the floor to regain its autonomy. The remaining hair was spread across the tiled floor so it reached the walls. I also cut into the hanging hair, shortening its length, so that this would help to fill in any gaps, then I left the space after placing the white gloves (inside the hanging hair) on my hands

Once in a while it’s important to clear out your glory hole

I performed up to four hours per day, for seven days. The process was much like making a drawing, offering a series of revelations about the materials in relation to the space and my body. I began with only the knowledge that I would wear my red sequinned dress, a trademark of my performances, and work with 5m lengths of hair, also the width of the performance space. I was interested in allowing the narrative to unfold in a series of episodes or installations. These episodes sought, through a visual and physical vocabulary, a coded score exploring labour, gender and notions of the sublime

extractors

Blockage in extractors, The Extractor Space, London, 2015. extractors was a group show, curated by the artist Wayne Lucas, which brought together ten artists who had previously held, over the course of a year, residencies and solo shows in The Extractor Space. Utilising in turn the nostalgic flickering sensitivity of the filmic, the seduction of gaudy lighting, the obsessively precise, the disturbingly lurid, or the repetition of performative action, all created installations in response to the dereliction and sensibility of this old Victorian school kitchen. Whether reinventing its role, ruminating on its ruination, or allowing the unsaid to seep from its walls, the works responded to its nooks and crannies and the spectacle of the everyday. For this show, each artist has been asked to ‘draw’, (in the widest sense of the word), generating new works by revisiting and reflecting on their own installations, tracing their experience of being in-residence. Rather than relying on a direct and immediate interaction with the site, the works will be made at a distance: to consider what could have been, what remains, what could become again, and then placed into the environment they most belong to, returning to their source. I had completed my residency in June 2014, where I made The pleasure of small partings. For extractors I decided to bring the hair back to perform alone, encasing it in ice at both ends of the drain. Slowly throughout the show the two ice blocks would melt, finally leaving their watery remains in the gutter and revealing the hair in its naked glory

Liberties

Performance documentation in Liberties, Collyer Bristow, London + The Exchange/Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall Works by over 20 women artists will reflect the changes in art practice within the context of sexual and gender equality since the introduction of the Sex Discrimination Act (1975) in the UK. Some artists confront issues that galvanised the change in law whilst others carved their own place in a complex and male dominated art world. From the radical movements of the 1960s and 70s, the politics of the 80s, the boom of lad culture in the 1990s to the current fourth wave of feminism, encouraged largely through and because of social media, all of the artists’ question equality and identity in very different ways. The exhibition presents a snapshot of the evolving conversations that continue to contribute to the mapping of a woman’s place in British society. Body, femininity, sex, motherhood, economic and political status are explored through film, photography, sculpture, performance and painting

The Portals Project: Part One

The Portals Project: Part One: El Umbral - The Threshold, Bermondsey Project Space, London 2022. Group show with/curated by Helena Goldwater, Lucía Imaz King, Wayne Lucas, and Simon Vincenzi The works are thresholds that visitors may enter: unbounded spaces, fantastic holes, precarious caves - sites of uncertainty, displacement and risk. As four artists using different but interconnected tactics, the works consist of a number of portals and framings that indicate turning points. Thresholds, whether in fiction or in architecture, invite us to leave a space behind in order to enter another; to decide to cross into a different world, one that may initially seem impenetrable but that opens up in time. In post-pandemic public life, spaces increasingly feature transparent screens to protect us from contamination, forming invisible divides. By contrast the thresholds in El Umbral break down boundaries and contaminate the imaginary. The invitation to pass through these portals offers choices that are intentionally unsettling. Extract from gallery hand-out/Written by Lucía King Two publication

Untitled photowork

This series of images was made in collaboration with photographer Manuel Vason, for the book exposures. Vason and I worked to create performance images reflective of my practice that would transcend documentation and become artworks in themselves. Exposures, ed. Manuel Vason, Lois Keidan and Ron Athey, 2003 (Black Dog Publishers)