This is a collection of five blogs I wrote while re-making my live art performance THE BUTTER PIECE. My writing is joined by five pieces from other artists whose work involves, or is about, the body. It’s an insight into the artistic process but also a reflection on themes that come up from living in our skin – being seen, looking and being looked at, queerness, shame, ageing, change and materiality.
The guest writers are: Orrow Amy Bell, Jade Blackstock, Gillian Dyson, Ursula Martinez & Holly Revell. It was edited by Jodean Sumner and features drawings by Gillian and photographs from Coralie Datta and Matt Rogers.
This is one of a series of writings that reflect on my journey toward re-making a performance art work called ‘The Butter Piece’. I first made it in 2011 and I’m revisiting it now a decade later.
‘The Butter Piece’ was shown live at CLAY, Leeds on the 26th November and Colchester Arts Centre on the 1st December. More details here.
08 December 2021
The most difficult part is the beginning.
Removing the dress.
There’s no way to take your clothes off that doesn’t smack of taking your clothes off
-and all that that denotes
I’m naked in it
And the butter starts hard.
As I ease up to it, it doesn’t respond easily
I have to give it my sure, smooth, slow movement.
And it responds by leaving oiliness up and around the spaces
- places you aren’t supposed to be aware of in company
It feels shameful.
Smeary
Like accidents and ignorance
Secretive - derived from
Secretions
Judgement
I feel hot.
The outer surfaces of my skin tighten against the gaze of the audience.
Later is better.
The social context slips away and naked is the new normal.
Anxious tension gives way to pleasure as
The butter gives me it’s soft, smooth, slow movement.
And I slide into it like a warm bath
- and play.
We make long slides
short shunts
We can do what we like.....
The end is a different kind of daring.
Clothes on, or off, doesn’t really matter because we have arrived
Exposure has melted into power
The risk is only falling
free falling
and free standing.
***************
This is one of a series of writings that reflect on my journey toward re-making a performance art work called ‘The Butter Piece’. I first made it in 2011 and I’m revisiting it now a decade later.
I made The Butter Piece because I wanted to confront SHAME.
We don’t talk about how we get to know our bodies as children, about masturbation, about wetness, very little about periods.
I spent a long time thinking my body, how I wanted to explore it and the responses it made, or didn’t, were wrong.
Rude
Messy
Leaky
Dirty
Shameful.
I thought I needed to close up and cover up.
I think this got in the way of my sexual potential as an adult.
Of my pleasure and my presence in my own body and my intimacy with others.
I eventually found a kind of sensual emancipation, probably around the time I made this piece, but personal journeys don’t just stop at the good bits.
My body continues to change and have new experiences – many of which are similarly not talked about and fester as a result.
I wonder what the opposite of shame might be…
I’ve decided on safety.
I realise that for me, it’s the security of trust with another, social validation in community and plain old information that have allowed me to right myself.
To risk being seen.
To revel in being felt.
To uncover
Open…….
Want.
In order to eradicate shame, inhabit my body and pursue pleasure I first need to feel safe. Safe from embarrassment, judgement, ridicule, betrayal, blame. It’s emotional safety.
-If you believe women’s bodies are precious and sacred as I do, then maybe it’s a kind of spiritual safety.
And as I write this I am mindful that, before any of that, there’s the need to be safe from harm. A physical and sexual respect that should be beyond the need to ask for it. Yet one that has not been, and is still not, afforded to so many women.
This is one of a series of writings that reflect on my journey toward re-making a performance art work called ‘The Butter Piece’. I first made it in 2011 and I’m revisiting it now a decade later.
Someone asked me if The Butter Piece was a queer work and I didn’t know what to answer. So I started thinking about the queer work I see, and the notion of ‘the queer body’ and I still don’t know what to answer.
I do use the term ‘queer’ to describe myself and I made The Butter Piece so that might make it queer by default. I’m also an artist but I am not sure everything I make is art – although it is when I intend it.
How do being and doing relate?
Sometimes I think my very identity is an action and vice versa. Sometimes it’s totally irrelevant, or I want it to be, to ensure no-one feels the work isn’t for them. But I also want to make it for some people in particular, and I want them to know it.
I made this first and foremost for women. The Butter Piece was definitely intended as a feminist action – my queer identity wasn’t something I platformed back then. It is more visible and important to me now. I’m starting to realise I’m a bit of a late developer with both my art and my voice.
If I try and feel it out, queerness for me relates a lot to ‘otherness’ but in some contexts I have felt ‘other’ as a woman so it’s hard to separate out difference and discrimination purely on the basis of gender or sexuality.
I can say that being in physcially intimate relationships with women has been transformative to my sense of self and my self is what I use to make performance. Intimacy with another female body has been validating, healing, informative, joyful. It has enabled me.
There’s no overt queer content in this piece though. No words. Just what you see and hear and maybe smell. I find references that speak to the sense of my sexuality in that but I don’t know whether you will.
We could take queerness to mean radical, the transgressive, and by this definition The Butter Piece is a sure thing. Queer in provocation, by putting my female body on display with my own agency.
Is it transgressive to be an audience to such an act then? Is it radical to look? Does that make you queer for those moments? Are we all having a collective queer experience?
This is one of a series of writings that reflect on my journey toward re-making a performance art work called ‘The Butter Piece’. I first made it in 2011 and I’m revisiting it now a decade later.
In the same way I might prepare a costume, or set, lighting, other things the audience might see
I am preparing myself. I am preparing my body.
I want to say ‘This is not about bettering my body’ – but that position isn’t cut and dried.
In creating a physical performance I do need to be stronger, I will want to access the full range of my physical expression. I definitely think about the aesthetic of the figurative form, how I am using my instrument.
It is possible that being more active might change my shape.
I might lose weight.
But, I have to check this rationale isn’t being ridden by a desire to be more attractive in a socially prescribed way. To check that my preparation isn’t masking a desperate dieting, gyming, tumbling race to the finish line of the show – where I am thinner and beautifuller and all my ex-girlfriends and artistic rivals kick themselves.
My way through is to think about being embodied. Grounded – where the ground is an internal surface. A place where I fill my skin, I am the right size, I can stand up inside myself with all my physical and emotional material.
And so I am training.
I’m training by spending quality time with myself
– sometimes exercising, sometimes not.
I’m looking at pictures of myself
I’m moving around
I’m being tactile when I can and noticing space when I can’t.
I’m eating
I’m noticing what pleases my skin
I’m attentive to tiredness, tenderness
I’m taking up space.
I’m noticing when I feel uncomfortable and not making it comfortable
I’m noticing when I feel groovy and not pissing on my own cornflakes.
I’m not hiding.
To be intimate with a lover, a friend, an audience
– you first have to be intimate with yourself
And intimacy is about honesty, clarity, vulnerability.
This spring I cared for my mum in the last days of her illness. I wrote several times during that period as a way to comfort myself. Here is the last of three blogs taken from some of that material. In sharing them I am mindful that not everyone is able to care for, or even see, their loved ones, especially in these challenging times; that not all caring relationships and indeed family relationships are the same; and that some of these thoughts might be painful to read – but I have benefited from finding connectivity and community around loss and learnt how to be around it from the openness of others and so I wanted to make an offer in that spirit and with love for all of our experiences.
In some literature and cultures it is believed that there are three deaths. The first is that of the body, the second is when the body is committed to its final resting, the third is when there is no one left to remember you or speak your name.
My mum wanted to be remembered and she often saw her grandchildren as her legacy. As her daughter without children it occurred to me that I might feel lacking in not being able to provide a legacy in accordance with her feelings and that I wanted to serve my mum’s legacy in my own right.
This wasn’t the only question to come out of my recent experience with regard to being childless. When I think about the care I was able to provide for my mum the question naturally arises who will do that for me? In a society where more and more people don’t have children or whose families are separated geographically there is some real thinking for us all to do on what the future of care for our elders looks like. But for me that’s for another day. Right now I’m trying to check in with myself about my legacy deficit.
And then I do and find to my surprise that I am alright about it. I am trying to reverse engineer why that might be. I’m sure some part of it is to do with the time I have spent assimilating my thoughts and experience of being childless but it’s not just that – I’ve got a scrapbook of other possibilities.
First, when I think about my mum wanting to be remembered I am not sure if she meant that she didn’t want to be forgotten and that’s not necessarily the same. Since she died I have encountered an outpouring of feeling and respect that revealed a woman bigger than just the one I knew. Yet despite her strong character she sometimes didn’t see the extraordinariness of what she achieved. In terms of distance travelled, my mum achieved a lot in her time especially for her time. Within the historical context for women and personal circumstances all her own, my mum came a long way – but I don’t know if her confidence matched her achievements. Maybe in wanting to be remembered she wanted to know that she was visible – that she mattered. I know she did and the distance I travel springs from her achievements so her legacy goes on. Ripples carry movement before and behind them.
I then realise lineage is often thought of directionally. From this, to that, in a single straight line. That just isn’t my experience of influence. Perhaps inspired by the role model of my mum’s strong character, even though it felt like it was to establish my individuality, I have sought out amazing family friends, mentors, colleagues and confidants of my own. The matrilineal influence that starts with the imprint of a parent and then becomes a community – is not a line it’s a web. So although children of my own could have been a certain kind of thread it is by no means the only way that I vibrate my, or my mothers energy, into the world. And not the only way hers was shared. We all spin in all directions.
I think about our ancestors, our collective consciousness and I think about trees. If one falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it does it make a sound? What is the remembrance of a tree? It could be in the preservation of it’s form in antique furniture much loved and passed down from one generation to the next. But it can also be it’s quiet degradation as it shelters then feeds a whole ecology. Or it can burn. It can be bonfires around which we sit and make memories or provide heat at the heart of our home. All different, all sacred.
I’ve found in these blogs how time and space are more than how we choose to organise them. Once we expand our notion of connection my mum has abundant legacy irrespective of my family circumstance and I see myself in that. I carry her continuing presence alongside my own. I show her things through my eyes.
Our longevity is as expansive as our imagination. So perhaps the only things to be concerned with are continuing to dare greatly and being a bit less English about expressing emotion and gratitude. Instead sharing the release of telling people – without waiting for an occasion. I see you, I love you, you matter. We will say your name.
This spring I cared for my mum in the last days of her illness. I wrote several times during that period as a way to comfort myself. Here is the second of 3 blogs taken from some of that material. In sharing them I am mindful that not everyone is able to care for, or even see, their loved ones, especially in these challenging times; that not all caring relationships and indeed family relationships are the same; and that some of these thoughts might be painful to read – but I have benefited from finding connectivity and community around loss and learnt how to be around it from the openness of others and so I wanted to make an offer in that spirit and with love for all of our experiences.
THE ART OF CARING
Caring is not pictures of holding hands doves still ponds Or soft woollens.
It is physical and sweaty. Full of impossible heart hurdles that you have to make possible. Holding your sadness whilst not compromising any bit of available joy and finding small wins that are always smaller and less frequent than the last ones.
It is fierce – fierce like a lioness Leaping over your reaction to repugnant smells and sounds so you can stay close Protective and exposed to a part of someone’s body that you’ve always been conditioned to not see – to go beyond your modesty and theirs.
And it’s tough – tough like a thick rope that will not give way not matter how frayed. Encouraging someone to push when they can trying to accept when they can’t. Sometimes you think you know better Sometimes they know better Sometimes no-one knows why what worked today won’t work again tomorrow.
Caring is an alternate time Slow, as you measure mouthfuls… and sips….. and breaths. Fast in panic – I want to know all of your story I want you to know all of my story. Agonising over not enough, or too late.
No, caring is a bear. Intimate – like a lover Finding the familiar shapes of dances, embraces, touches that might make movements easier to
I want to give you the best chance at this experience and transition. I want to give myself the best chance at this experience and transition. We are both doing something we have no idea we can do -or how to do it.
It’s the comfort of being of service at the time when someone must, willing or not, entrust themselves to you. I’m glad it was me. And I’m glad of the others territorialism collapsing into gratitude.
Caring is total Every part of me is occupied with every part of you. I am writing my novel – an invisible tome of observations of what you need and how you work.
Washing – there’s a lot of washing. (One of us is often in a half state of undress).
We cannot be frightened together And we don’t want to talk about -but finding a balance. Helping you to understand what is happening with honesty in truth is independence…
Not wanting you to go Not wanting you to be in pain Not wanting you to lose consciousness because then you will lose me too
Caring is selfless A shell full of patience from the ocean floor.
We are in a bubble. Of ever decreasing circumference
Moving a living space, then a limb, then a lip
There is something restful in being this present. Our small world of basic needs Microscopic details Yet my heart so big it is pressing against the ceiling of your room.
I am heroic – I am big enough to hold this. I am a lost child – I don’t know what to do.
I wanted to capture everything, take photos, make imprints. I don’t think it was hanging on more awe that we are doing this crafting it between us. Giving and receiving our completely separate journeys in complete symbiosis. This is our blood. This is our art.
This spring I cared for my mum in the last days of her illness. I wrote several times during that period as a way to comfort myself. Here is the first of three blogs taken from some of that material. In sharing them I am mindful that not everyone is able to care for, or even see, their loved ones – especially in these challenging times; that not all caring relationships and indeed family relationships are the same; and that some of these thoughts might be painful to read – but I have benefited from finding connectivity and community in loss and learnt how to be around it from the openness of others and so I wanted to make an offer in that spirit and with love for all of our experiences.
ALL THE STARS ARE IN THE SKY
I have only seen one person die.
Been with them at that moment – or series of moments.
It was the father of a previous girlfriend. He was called Tony. She is called Jen.
We hadn’t been together long and so it was a rather rushed intimacy and polite social dynamic to be with her family at such a personal time.
I was so frightened. Frightened of not being useful or being socially awkward, frightened of seeing death, frightened of death, frightened of not being able to cope, frightened of making it all about me. I coached myself on the journey into each visit – to remember what mattered, to try and be a vehicle, a vessel for whatever the circumstance required.
I didn’t know at the time but I definitely did after, and every day since, what a gift and privilege it was. Such a sacred and precious life experience. I learnt things – all the small steps of someone slowing down. How looks change, how time changes. How a family can hold space for it. And that death can be peaceful and releasing.
After I felt euphoric – celebratory. So glad that I had made it through, that he had, that we had. He had taught us the last lesson a father can – how to die – and taught us well. It will forever be a blessing.
Now I sit with my mum as she slows.
Her eyes don’t open. Her mouth opens permanently but there are no words where I want them. But I am grateful for recognising the signals, having had an experience to give some familiarity to this unimaginable time in my life’s journey – and hers.
I think about Tony and ask that he will look after her if she needs it. Show her the way in ‘whatever next’ in the way he showed me on this side how to go. It is a comfort.
It reminds me of how much a gift that sharing was. That the thing I was terrified to be anywhere near – is actually so necessary to be a part of.
And even though Jen and I were only on the same path for a short time and have since found new relationships, I find a continuing connection from sharing that experience.
And even though they never met and knew nothing of each other, I now think of our parents being connected in this universal journey. Like the lights of lamposts running down a long curving road. The light of one, and then the light of another, shaping the darkness.
They say you meet someone for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. I always thought that maybe I met Jen to accompany her on her dad’s passing. Now I think perhaps it was so her father could accompany me and my mum on hers. Time isn’t how you think it is. Space is spacious.
And as I open my mind up to this possibility I know my friend Jo’s mum is on the cusp of her passing. And there will be more with us. And I think about how my mum might light a lamp for her, then her to light the way for the next. The spirits of all our parent’s connecting. Their light comforting each other so that in ‘wherever they are’ no one is lonely or lost – no matter how far apart the links in the chain.
And together the constellation of their lights hold us up
