I’ve been a working artist, curator, community activist and teacher for more than 25 years, creating and producing intimate solo performances, large-scale public happenings, socially engaged interventions and performance art workshops and lectures. My practice extends across black boxes and white cubes, art fairs and subway stations, international festivals, and single bathroom stalls. I’ve operated an artist-run newsstand in a vacant subway station kiosk, a soup kitchen for artists, a breast milk tasting bar, and a performance festival hub for kids. I’m forever inspired by the rebel queers, renegade witches, and other dyke moms I run with, and bound to many brilliant artists, activists, spell-casters and healers. For many years I made performances that drew from my own experiences of trauma and transformation, intimacy and motherhood. More recently, I’ve experienced a shift in my practice, where my attention has turned to wider theoretical questions about the nature of performance itself to ask questions about when, where, how we perform - in theatres and galleries, on social media, and in our everyday lives.
Mummy and kids are in the frame and Daddy’s behind the camera.
We are a nice nuclear family.
We are a hetero-normative unit.
Tesco loves us, Disney adores us and McDonalds can’t get enough of us.
We are complicit in consumer capitalism. We, the family, are the solid bedrock of society, at least that is what we are told. Instead we will dissent! We will have fun and take the piss. We have decided to organize a programme of events in our council house for the duration of Liverpool 08 and beyond.
We have decided to voice our discontent. We have decided to ask questions around art and culture, money and capitalism, private and public, familial and civic life.
We have decided to disobey. We, as a family, have decided to be naughty.