Baking Pea Vol-Au-Vants at The House That Balthus Lived, Image by Helene Roberts

During the past year I have performed stereotypes in the public realm interacting with usually unknowing participants in the collaborative Chav series with Thomas Goddard: Chav at First Sight and Chav Grand Tour, and my solo-project Passersby. I have found these performances increasingly uncomfortable to undertake due to the difficulties in having no particular place to inhabit for their duration.

This has coincided with an increasing focus on installation works as immersive spaces developed during my ongoing collaboration with Helene Roberts (b. Wales, 1979-). Since 2010 Roberts & I have built installations in galleries, studios and domestic spaces disconnected physically from other exhibited works i.e. set in rooms apart from the other artworks. On entering these installations the viewer seems to enter an environment that exists in parallel with the rest of the gallery. For example, we inhabited the attic of Cardiff's tactileBOSCH to build The Cabinet Particular, The Opium Den and the Merz influenced Cathedral of Erotic Miseries; and we inhabited and flooded the cellar of Cardiff's g39 for ¿AreWeNotDrawnOnwardToNewEra?  Most recently Roberts and I created a darkly domestic space in an empty (unrented) flat in Cardiff for The House That Balthus Lived. 

One difference with The House That Balthus Lived to the previous installations is that the flat where the piece was staged does not ordinarily operate as an exhibition space and so the viewer initially seemed to enter a real home. Another difference is that during the opening event performance artists enacted the family that supposedly lived in the flat. The other installations were exhibited as spaces empty of inhabitants with later performances for the camera after the exhibitions had closed. Their un-inhabitation created a polarity between performances without spaces (Chav at First Sight, etc.) and spaces without performers (The Cabinet Particular, etc.). In offering installation as exhibited live performance space The House That Balthus Lived straddled my two areas of practice: immersive installation and performance of identity.

The Aftermath of Baking Pea Vol-Au-Vants at The House That Balthus Lived, Image by Helene Roberts

In a similar manner to my practice of demonstrating the dynamism and unfixity of identity through constant character transformations, the installations will demonstrate the same through their cycles of transformation. Each installation space parodies real-world, real spaces: studio, office, commercial, domestic, etc. Each space will be open to the viewer as participant/user; the manner in which they participate with, or use it will be dependent on the identity of each installation. Each space will be inhabited and uninhabited at different times to play with presence and absence. Each will aim to antagonize, upset, frustrate and/or agitate the viewer through different anti-social strategies that will include: parody, deceit, surveillance and theft.

The Aftermath of Baking Pea Vol-Au-Vants at The House That Balthus Lived, Image by Helene Roberts