It's Been A While

My Lord. It's been over a year, almost 2, since my last post. Much has changed. Barack Obama is now President of the United States of America, Michael Jackson is dead, I found out I am not actually allergic to peanuts and subsequently embarked on my peanut honeymoon. However, much is still the same, I still appreciate a good moustache on a man, thoroughly enjoy dressing up and find deceased birds fascinating.

Since August 18th i have been residing in Brooklyn, NY whilst studying at the Pratt Institute of the Arts on exchange and in my 3rd year of Art School. In these 3 months i have managed to come across 3 dead birds. Beautiful little things - I put 2 of them in my freezer as i am using them for a performance/installation, which i will inform you about in time. The other bird, however, was still alive when i found it but looked severely injured. I took some time and deliberated whether to leave it or take it home and care for it. It was obvious the poor thing was going to die as its eyes were filled with blood, so i decided to take it and make its last hours on earth as comfortable as they could be, under the circumstances. Anyway, when i arrived home, police were outside my apartment as there had been an attempted break in on the 3rd floor. I entered my apartment and proceeded to fashion a nest out of a tupperware box and toilet paper for the bird. I left some nuts incase he was hungry. When i went into my room after the nest was completed i realised that i had been bloody burgled. Brand new Macbook pro (bought the week before), Ipod and jewellery gone. R.I.P. The bird died shortly after. I buried him in the back yard.

Anyway, enough of this. I am going to give a quick back draft on what I had been working on throughout my 2nd year. I was still pre-occupied and interested in performance and the female figure (primarily the discontent felt with my own). I was beginning to feel frustrated with females who were living their lives under the pseudonym "post feminists". I feel that i have been born into a generation x of women who are struggling to find their own identities, as there has been a prescribed collective identity forced onto us by the media The playboy symbol is marketed towards young girls for Christ sake. Is this empowerment? We have no sever unqualities to fight against like the suffragists, we have no repressed sexuality to fight against like the feminists of the 60s and 70s and we have no restrictions of feminism to fight against like the original post-feminists. What we do have is a very confusing situation where it seems as if all the doors are open to us (women) but this is not true. We have such a long way to go and we are constantly back peddling what the feminists strived to do by not appreciating this. We are lucky that we have had such inspirational women path the way for us but this has made us lazy. Women now feel liberated by declaring themselves "like a man". They can sleep around "like a man" or hold male-like attributes as being desirable in the work place. This isn''t what the early feminists were aiming for. We should be comfortable as females, we should be proud to be strong women by simply being who we are; women, without having to act "like a man". I had become interested in the glamourization (sp?) of porn stars, strippers and the sex industry in general after briefly attending a strip club on a friends birthday. I had begun chatting to a Romanian woman who di

d not try to sugar coat her situation in the slightest. She felt degraded and trapped. This became my piece. I wanted to degrade myself, i wanted to put myself in the most vulnerable position i could to investigate my own emotions (how my body and mind would react to being in such a position) and others reacti

ons ( to the uncomfortable situation). Baring in mind how insecure i am about my body. Ths became a performance piece in Blysthwood Square where i danced in my underwear, during the day, on a box until it broke and the police were called.

At the end of the performance i was left with the broken box. These remnants represented, for me, the attempt to try and break through my own insecurities and fears. The pieces were then cast from a silicone mold in plaster. The installation was set up in 3 waves; the black and white image in the background that you can see from the chairs; which are placed accordingly infront of the table (but not close enough to touch) and cannot be moved.