Artist: Existence Visibility Voice (April – August 2020)

In March 2020 the coronavirus transported me to a residency in Guest Studio 3 of Konstepidemin, a vast space in a epicentral location. 

This studio and what became five months of hermit-like residency in an era of global pandemic, chaos, lockdowns and stillness, gave me the emotional, spiritual, physical and relational space to undertake what was perhaps the most complete form of self- and cultural- investigation of my life to date.  Drawing on all the tools of my intellectual, spiritual, vocational and artistic formation so far, as well as the stories and examples of certain others who had gone before me – Judy Chicago, Alex Honnold, Emily Nagoski, Marina Abramovic, Marianne North, Sophie Calle, Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson, Nehemiah, Paul, the women artists of Seeing Ourselves by Frances Borzello, and, as ever, Pierrette Fleutiaux – I used the site of the large 7m by 3m wall, alongside the high ceilings, large windows, isolated location, and symbolic space to truly inhabit and face the pressing questions of my present existence and desires.  What had the ground of my life prepared me for? Who was I becoming?  What kind of artist might I be?  These deep questions, alongside the framing of the concepts of Existence, Visibility and Voice drew me into immense confrontations with internalised cultural values and ideologies that were attempting a form of continual containment and self-betrayal.  The terrors of including certain life material – intellectual accomplishments, evidence of a life-long living faith, choices regarding personal relationships – visible was equalled in ferociousness only by the shame of allowing certain absences – a long term romantic partnership, children – to be felt.  These strong feelings pointed to the implicit rules within which adult life is lived and judged in the cultures of which I had been a part.  But who set those rules?  From where did they drive the legitimacy that had the power to threaten me into submission, silence, invisibility, disappearance?  Over months of joyful and arduous work, I allowed the confrontations to appear, faced them, examined them, cried out the pains of them, so undoing them, and instead expanded and renewed the inhabiting of my ground, according to my own deep treasuring of love, honour, hope, mercy, courage, truth and freedom.

And the final Open Studio installation invited others to inhabit the Existence Visibility and Voice of the artist, on her terrain, which, she was learning and longing to form according to the rule of Love.

And in so doing, I hoped to be part of a world in which the relentless invisibling of women documented in the work of Caroline Criado Perez (2019) was no longer possible.