I have found myself focused on employing marginalized and neglected spaces, that many would not go to organically and transforming them from their original sites into sites of imagination through dance, sculptural pieces and improvised singing and poetical dialogue.
Final project
Talking to the dry bones (for those in the desert)
My works this semester prioritise what can come from loss and grief, with a central focus on how performance and dance can utilise the female morphology to build the body back up in love.
As a starting point, I have taken the biblical metaphor of being in the desert, to describe the task of losing faith and being lost for hope in the ‘valley of the shadows of death’ or in more simple terms landscapes of emptiness, disappointment and hopelessness that arises from loss.
My aim is to make work for anyone who comes to look for help only to find the “dry bones”, and to wrestle with the question of how can these dry bones live again? How can we re-ignite our faith in the present? My task is to talk to these bones, talk to my own feminine soul and see how one can be born again through performative dance, improvised poetry and singing and sacramental baptisms.
Building the body up in love, to restore faith
I’ve been given a sense of truth regarding the importance of my pursuit in exploring ambiguous questions of how divine intervention is present in our lives throughout this semester and experiences the freeing of the human spirit through creation, nature and dance. I’ve discovered three convictions throughout this semester; the importance of the metaphors of baptism, and the connection between water and the unconscious mind or dreams. Some of my most revelatory works were performed at geographies situated the boundary of where water starts and land ends, which to me signifying a metaphor of moving into unconscious unknown territories.
The second being my interested in how we spiritually understand ourselves, and how my own story relates to the stories of others, in terms of being lost for faith. Through my performances I can explore my capacity for love and transformation which are realized through practices of aesthetic self-creation. I utilize ornamentation for a deliberate enjoyment of one’s own embedded bodily gestures and dance movements. Eros is a feminist strategy for filling my work with joy, eroticism, flowers, feminine costumes, and romantic landscapes.
My third conviction is the importance of the flesh and the Feminine, and that the sacred and the erotic are unified. Awareness of soul-and bodies inseparability allows me to be working towards joy in my art to embrace grace and self-transformation.
Love in the intangible spaces between
A women sends a wind moves through the trees, causing them to appear to breathe. The birds and plastic is heard singing syncronistiy, belonged to her chimming heartbeat. She dances, watching her lover the forest sleeping, whose branches are about to fall, those which have entrapped her in a cave of love. Using her body as a site of resistance for nature to hold onto, she begs her lover to wake up and to connect.
” where do I end, and you begin? who could love you more than I? Can you reveal yourself to me”, she sings… convinced that she will leave this time until, upon awakening, he calls her name, and she answers… “Yes, my love, here I am…”
Cyclic and repetitive rhythms of nature present the tension between the desire for creation and connection and death and morning for loss.
the power of the landscape
By inverting Freudian ideas of repression ‘being inside of us’ to instead see the environment as sites of repression that have been disregarded and need tapping into, we can utilize artistic practices to allow ourselves and others to come to understand different ways we can connect with nature. My use of the landscape and topography has come to register the expansive imagination and an exploration of my female solitude.
love stories and Serenades to dying flowers
I am a divine thing, I’m a divine thing, I’m a divine thing, I have a beautiful space inside my heart and I chose to fill it with love and grace, and therefore I have a divine and poetic tongue that I chose to speak with when I perceive someone or something to be beautiful. I have a grace god and praise them often.
Competing with the sea and venus salt dreams
I sing to the lilies and roses the color of my skin, and as I speak their petals expand as my breath caresses their skin. I breath more heavily than usual, for we are blossoming together, like lovers. I dwell within these shared breaths.
Visionary Thinkers
Visionary Creators
Visionary Makers