Daughter (wet-hole)

By challenging conventions of the abject body, my practice seeks to question boundaries between self and other through exploiting the instability of language, often with reference to the writings of Georges Bataille, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. Like the fluidity of words, images merge from one thing to another; a sun becomes an anus, a vagina becomes a mouth, an egg becomes an eye, tears become blood, blood becomes semen. Inspired by the performative work of Hannah Wilke and Samuel Beckett, the work explores different registers of object and subject as a way to decentralise the male gaze. Through the use of projection mapping onto the face and body, the body becomes something that is performed, continually in a process of becoming as it unfolds, in the vein of Deleuze, through space and time. The female body can assert its presence and, most crucially, its desire through the disruption of normalised presentations of the feminine.

'Daughter (wet-hole)' is a performance that examines bodily transgression through different thresholds of the external and the internal body. Daughters are those silenced by the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy who must work to recover their mother's story; we must 'give her the right to pleasure, to jouissance… We must find… words… that speak corporeal' (Irigaray, 1991, 43). These words become images, visually writing the body through performance, the mouth and vagina becoming central instruments to explore these theories of the corporeal. These holes ingest, expel, secrete, endlessly transgressing the threshold between outside and inside, between form and formless, between being and becoming. The fluidity of this movement is translated into the performance, where corporeal images are projected, in isolation, on various body parts to provoke questions about the body in order to disrupt the silence surrounding taboos of the abject. Where does this body begin and end? How do I assert my pleasure, my jouissance, within this body and in relation to another body? How does performing the female body, and the abject, dislocate patriarchal economies of representation?