Dr Gillian Dyson

This paper analyses implications for body and attire in creating clothing for performance art which challenges normalcy of the feminine. Jackson and Dyson will discuss their interdisciplinary research collaboration in designing garments for Dyson’s performance artwork Bare Bones. The research considers cultural standards for and expectations of the feminine. Through experimentation of material construction with movement and voicing, they ask: Why does somatic interaction with this clothing contribute to deconstructing our understanding of functional and aesthetic garments, thus troubling the activity and ‘beauty’ of the body? Dyson’s practice-based-research is of conditions of menopause, building on concerns with the uncanny feminine, performing with inanimate objects to establish unnerving familiar and unfamiliar conditions. Jackson’s garments are assembled through a Responsive Making method, responding intuitively to Dyson’s work, with respect for the will of materials. This method is underpinned by post-human theory of intra-action (Barad 2007): experiential, haptic, tacit knowledge as key to the process (Bugg 2006). Repurposed waste garments reveal softness, slackness, fold, and flow, whilst presenting supportive yet constraining property. Materials prompt or lead the performer, generating sculptural and sound content, thus contributing to construction of meaning in relationship to the female body. Paradoxically, research led to reconsideration of the naked female body. Cutting into garments revealed sections of flesh. Thus garments ‘fail’; societal assumptions about gendered body ideals are questioned (Svendsen & Irons, 2006; Butler, 2006). ‘Clothes rewrite the body, give it [different shape and expression]. This applies not only to the clothed body but also to the unclothed; or, more precisely, the unclothed body is always also clothed’ (Svendsen & Irons, 2006:77). Jackson and Dyson argue this ‘partial garment’ foregrounds ‘aesthetics of ugly’ (2005: 130). Intersecting with the body boundaries, the body is masked but remains integral to understanding the garment: one cannot exist without the other (Negrin, 2016).

Why theatrical, artistic exploration of one’s own body movement and voice in relation to material objects and space, bring into question and develop understanding of the aging, feminine body? A brief intro’ to my emerging practice-based research – a reflection on menopause using Butoh dance theatre, strength training and vocal work as mediums. Considering the menopausal whale as metaphor or model for a different kind of embodied experience of aging.

The performance endeavours to communicate the real felt tensions of feminine aging. Working on a floor of broken crockery, Dyson's performance brings together slow Butoh dance movement with approaches in body-based performance art. Wordless vocalisation and the construction of an audio track explore ambient and body sound further examine concerns with agency and ‘voicelessness’. The performer’s clothing examines compression and constraint, exposing breasts and belly in a dialogue of gender signification.

performance examining experience of aging: dress, gold foil, eggs.

A discussion of the performance work of Gillian Dyson, and of Robbie Synge, through an understanding of Freud's Uncanny.

Devised and performed for Drafting Performance. Baltic 39. Newcastle. March 2015.

Solo Performance

Solo Performance

Performed at LUPA London

Performance commissioned for New Work Yorkshire

Screening of video work originally commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella.

Live performance

A discussion of performance and liminal space, focusing upon the 'ten-foot' back ally architecture and sense of place in Kingston Upon Hull.

Conversations on socially engaged performance practice.

3 hour solo performance work exploring notions of the domestic uncanny.

Exhibition Performance and Community Engagement project for residents of Chapel Town Leeds.

Solo performance commissioned by Beacon Art Project for 'Creating a Scene’ - National Centre for Craft & Design, Sleaford

Performance presentation for Compass Live Art.

Co-curation of an exhibition of live and new media art for Hull 2017 City of Culture, to celebrate the history and influence of Hull Time Based Arts organisation. March 24-26 2017

Table responds to the Symposium context of practice in dialogue with the everyday, intimacy and place. It recalls my historic works and notably discussions with Third Angel arising from the experience of exhibiting alongside the company in Hull, 1997. This practice-based research performance examines the object / performer context in relation to stillness, repetition and shadow as primary research drivers that are prompted by phrases gleaned from initial reading of Sigmund Freud’s essay The Uncanny/Das Unheimliche, and encounters with Martin Heidegger’s exploration of Thing theory. My current research interests emerge from concerns with the use of objects in performance, particularly those things that come from or reference the domestic, the house or home. In the process of this research performance I wish to consider what the relocating of the domestic object from house to studio does to our understanding of that object, in particular in relation to the feminine.

My provocation is to suggest that movement of the feminine body alongside seemingly familiar objects provokes especially uncanny conditions where both material subjects become unfamiliar and politically charged. I argue that this uncanny relationship offers the performer agency to trouble and deconstruct sites of gender-normativity. I discuss my methods for exploring this destabilizing strategy through a reflective narrative of my artwork Seven Tables (2016-19). I address the physical and conceptual space of the feminine homely and unhomely whilst seeking to further understand the potentiality for the aging female performer to challenge gender constructs. Concerns with overlapping public and private space seem more relevant since the outbreak of COVID-19. And perhaps these concerns are accompanied by an uncomfortable realization that the home persists as a site of gendered roles and expectations. Through working with tables, I ask how the (un)familiar object provokes an embodied somatic response, experienced through and as the phenomenological consideration of my moving body. Prompted by Freud’s The Uncanny, my research is informed by post-structural feminist theorists, particularly Sara Ahmed who draws attention to the significance of the table in constructing gender identities. My work is an improvised choreography of encounters with the everyday. Through a corporality of rhythms and task repetitions of the body, my work celebrates the familiar feminine whilst troubling persistent constructs. Thus, this article provokes a re-assessment of notions of boundaried femininity. This writing reflects thirty years of performance art practice and emerges from my practice-based PhD research at the University of Glasgow in 2020.

Collaborative performance with VIctoria Gray and Nathan Walker in response to an international commission of global simultanious performance.

Discussing the pedegogy of performance practice with undergraduate students.

How does a feminine uncanny appear through an interplay of interior/ exterior; private / public, self / other? My paper discusses why performance research in the home as a site might produce a reading (or re-reading) of what is familiar (the home), and evoke or reveal the unfamiliar (the unhomely or uncanny). I describe recent practice research (made to-camera) in relation to notions of the uncanny and intimate. I consider performative process as reading, a scrutiny and comprehension, of the domestic. According to Sigmund Freud the uncanny exists as a frightening manifestation of what has long been familiar. I apply Freud’s theory of the Uncanny (Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny) 1919) to consider the familiar and unfamiliar image of/ in the home, and the creation of uncanniness through the interaction of body, object and site. I reflect on Hélène Cixous’ investigation into the Freud text to highlight the elusive uncertainty in Freud’s attempt to define the uncanny, and to ask how an understanding of the uncanny is formed through the reality of live performance (lived gesture) rather than fiction? I draw upon Julia Kristeva’s vocabulary of the abject to further consider what marks the uncanny in relation the home as threshold of the intimate and public and reflect on the implications of this for a feminist practice.

The performance involves whittling and paring a wooden spoon(s). The artist performs this action seated on a wooden chair. As she carves into the wood of the spoon with a knife, shavings of wood fall around her. It is a ‘real time’ action that should last approximately 45 minutes. She attempts to reduce the spoon to ‘nothing’.

a reflection on the abject relationship of dirt and the feminine body.

a critical refelction on the practice research performance work 'cleaning steps' - cleaning the front door steps of strangers' houses, in teh context of the Covid-19 lock down. considering the relationship between women, dirt and notions of the clean and dirty.

Curation of live and media art programme with FACT, and development of symposium programme for Hull 2017 UK City of Culture, Humber Street Gallery. March 2017.

Solo performance work based on current practice-based research concerns with the feminine uncanny.

Solo performance art work. duration 60 minutes.

Wise Women Exhibition and symposium