ARTISTS TALKING

Wet Cup, Kanonhallen, Copenhagn, 2001.

I am sitting on a high, chrome stool in a black box theatre space. Through the glare of the spotlights I can make out people standing, watching. Ernst Fischer, who also performs in the work, gets up and begins, one after another putting heated glass 'cups' on my flesh, covering my back, my front, my legs. There are twenty-two in total. They feel heavy and pull on my skin. He leaves them for a few minutes and then returns. Slowly he removes each one, makes a superficial cut in my skin with a scalpel and then replaces it. I watch myself being opened with the scalpel and then the suction of the cup pulling, sucking, and feeding blood out and into itself. I can feel it/me seeping out of me; my beginnings and endings extending and blurring. I see the glasses filling; I feel exposed, raw, and increasingly oscillate between devastation and elation. I can feel energies build up inside me, it begins to feel as though I will barely contain them.

Ernst's discreet presence makes a final return. As he carefully removes the glass cups so as not to spill the blood, I experience a huge release of tension and energy. I am marked with large round purple bruises and clotting blood. A blood print is made of each cut and hung on a taught wire like photographic prints drying.

Afterwards people don't say much except some thank me and say it was beautiful. I am not quite certain what this means although I am pleased. I'm glad that they can describe their experience – whereas I remain somewhat lost for words, a little traumatised still...

And that is the point: that the action exceeds language. I make these works because words fail me – I can't put 'it' into words, I just have to do it, or be it. Representation fails me because I desire to make work about things that are, perhaps, unrepresentable. A trauma occurs as a wounding, a temporal/spatial relationship in which possibilities can be explored, a rupturing and collapsing of structures, an unmaking. This involves, for me at least, going into the unknown, so that each occasion is remarkable and unreproducable, and that is the point.

My practice emerged from a fine art background. It employs performance, video and installation with which to consider the body as a site in which narrative threads of the personal, sexual, social and political are continuously shifting permutations. The materiality or fabric of the body, as well as the specificity of my actual body, is also important. The relationships between bodily interior/exterior spaces are explored as a continuum. The permeable boundaries of the skin membrane defy it as an impenetrable container of a coherent or fixed 'self'. There is an urge to extend the boundaries of the body, to continue to negate its currencies. The perimeters of the body are questioned and subverted to upset and startle how we read and experience it. The body becomes the paradigm as well as the site where the reference points slip and slide; the interplay between public and private becomes confused.

Duration and pushing bodily limits has always been key in my work. Over the last two years the medical has been a primary source of research. In my last three major works I have used old medical blood-letting techniques on myself by way of a bodily utterance or articulation; invoking notions of trauma (a wound) and stigma (a mark) towards a 'spoiling' and opening of the body suggesting an alterity or otherness. Medical discourse has long dominated a theorising of the body within Western society. Among other things my work questions this exclusivity.

Working with the methodology of my actual, experienced physical self means my practice is very much process-orientated; the performance being a moment of existing within that framework. The consequences of the action go on before and long after the viewers arrive and depart. A palimpsest of tiny scars in varying stages of disappearance is being established on my body from each successive performance. They both document a history of the work and are, indeed, part of the work – collapsing the differences between 'making' and 'performing'.

The work simultaneously recognises and resists the signification of the (specifically female) body and investigates the dynamics of looking. The audience become complicit in this by undertaking their own process of confirmation and denial of what they are seeing. As the work is often explicit and sometimes uncomfortable it seeks to question rather than provide easy answers. By asking the audience to take a risk with me a sense of intimacy is established, creating a direct and immediate dialogue. They become collaborators; complicit from the moment they make the decision to be there. Each performance feels like some kind of contract between myself and the audience, clearly negotiated by each party.

Never was this clearer than in a work called Unknowing, a commission for Small Acts at the Millennium:

Over a year ago now. My birthday party, in a hotel in a city I barely knew, shared with a small group of (mostly) strangers, some of whom had responded to an invitation in a newspaper advert to 'come to my birthday party' and witness my survival; my making it to the millennium. I had spoken on the phone with the people who responded to the ad, and these little interactions from the privacy of my living room were like little performances. I would tell each one that there would be a ritualised blood-letting – my party piece if you will – and had listened to their fears and hopes and indecision about attending. One said no. I liked that. We had talked and she decided to withdraw from the process. Her anonymous. Me anonymous.

The visual considerations of my work tend to be formal, economical and precise. Its minimalist sculptural approach both informs, and provides a framework with which to view the work. I have shown in traditional galleries and non-art spaces including domestic ones, questioning how meaning is altered through a shifting of context and the ways in which the boundaries between the public and the private are blurred. My work utilises conventions – recognisable systems of looking and mediating 'art' in the hope that the action can rupture that fabric of those systems.

Blood is still considered an agency of taboo and abjection; one work triggered perhaps unconscious and unspoken fears last year when I attempted to show Wet Cup in an institution (by their invitation). Unused to dealing with work of this kind, elaborate and comprehensive lists of health and safety requirements were presented to me, including:

"...the performer's current psychiatric state and state whether there is any previous medical history of psychiatric or psychological conditions. Results of blood test confirming Hep B, Hep C and HIV status and the result of a full blood count must be issued".

Horrified, I refused to comply, feeling that they were being unethical and – effectively – censorious. Rather hastily I saw no alternative but to withdraw the piece, resulting in my own self-censoring. I felt my only recourse was to do the piece for camera and to show the video instead – which I did, ironically, with the stained and bloodied paraphernalia used in the private work also presented in the space (as this was allowed this narrowed the source of fear down even more to my living, bleeding body being cut). I did not set out to make a controversial work. However a situation like the above reveals narratives that still prevail about the body and indeed about the artist.

This experience has prompted me to question context and the mechanisms of these public manifestations. Are these contexts appropriate, and how can my practice begin to engage with these questions? A constant question for me, as one process ends and another begins, is 'where does the work really lie'? Is it within these issues?