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.
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?
I was walking along the canal when I saw a duck dive so it was half submerged and half above water – bum up.
And in that split second I KNEW exactly how it felt. Not emotionally but kinaesthetically. I had a total experience of knowing it’s shape, how much it weighed, what it was like to touch and how it’s body felt in and out of the deep. It was one of those unexplainable moments.
Later I realised my lockdown projects of keeping (and so handling) chickens, wild swimming and trying to be in my own body were all ingredients of this withchery.
There is more.
My sister and I have decided to read all my mum’s books. My mum loved reading and always had a book in her hand, or splayed half open on the arm of the chair where she was sitting.
In holding a ‘mum book’ out in front of me I can see my own hands and also slip into another consciousness where I can simultaneously experience her hands and know the feel of them around this same book. Part of what I see is heredity but there is another Knowing of her shape and sense of touch that I can trace on top of, or under, my own.
Later I realised my experience of caring for my mum in her end of life journey meant I knew the intimacies of her body in a more tactile way than I ever had before. Her skin, her joints, the weight and texture of her landscapes – the physical act of caring bringing a tangibility to our continuing bond.
I wonder about the impact of a year, in which most people had no, or very little touch, on our embodied empathy. The collective context of the pandemic has lent itself to online sharing and temporary communities of individual experience – loss and grief have been real points of connection for me and many.
But I wonder about the physical body, the vessel that holds the heart and spiritual self, it’s potential for us to make connections beyond our busy everyday consciousness. The intimacy of this raw material that knows that you, a book, a bird, a hand, love, are all one in the universe.
The words ‘feeling’ and ‘touching’ have multiple meanings and that makes a new kind of sense as I realise anew that what I experience physically has a relationship with what I experience emotionally – even across space and time.
We all transfer, imagine and recreate touch we have felt.
