Output details

'This Is Performance Art', exhibition including a multi-part fictional television documentary series and performance at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield 2011 (co-commission with Camden Arts Centre), Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre

Developing from a two-month research residency at Camden Arts Centre, this project resulted in a new and innovative working method where collectively staging the documentation and historical context for a performance becomes a devising tool for the performance.

'This Is Performance Art' a multi-part fictional television documentary series, interrogates the fragmentary and unreliable nature of historical record, questioning the faulty mechanics of museological, archival and curatorial approaches to live art by adopting faux-institutional presentational methods.

Secondhand anecdotes and mythologies surrounding performers and their performances are expanded, distorted and supplanted by new fictions, with archival photographs and footage, authentic ephemera appropriated and re-contextualised. The film and the pseudo-archive generated by it have been the basis of a number of exhibitions and large-scale performance events. The 'TIPA' series continues to be a key strand of my research in developing interdisciplinary collaborations.

The research has resulted in invitations to present a number of performative papers at academic conferences including the Henry Moore Institute’s Sculpture and Performance Conference (2010 Tate Liverpool), the Arnolfini’s Performing Documents (2013) and The University of Westminister’s Exhibiting Performance Conference (2013). In addition, I devised new work for the series as an invited lead participant in Trashing Performance during year two of the Performance Matters AHRC project at Goldsmiths College. The project lead to my appointment as Supported Artist at Lancaster Institute of Contemporary Art 2011-2014 a scheme designed to support innovative interdisciplinary practice.

Collaborators included: New Art Club, the Beaux Belles, Paul Higgs, Dinnington Colliery Band, Gwyneth Herbert and Joanna Neary.