I am a storyteller and I use the mediums of the stage, live performance, video and photography as my tools. I am primarliy interested in the theme of time travel and anachronic time. Most of my live performances involve time travel, timelessness and eternity and exploring other dimensions beyond the fourth. This is coupled with the Afrofuturistic trope of seeking a safe place called home somewhere beyond time and space. For example, “Killing Time” is both a one-woman show in collaboration with artist-scientist Kristoffer Stefan’s sculpture called a “Bundelung”. The production’s aims are to look at ways of revealing time as an unnecessary social construct (limited by rules of the clock and calendar). We attempt to draw the past, the present and future into a transcendent simultaneity. Western civilisation has endured several different calendars based on ideas and concepts on ways to manage time and to conduct it. Even the Julian calendar we use is flawed (February has 29 days every fourth year and we have daylight saving hours) and therefore today’s date is a totally fictional point in space. Time as we know it now is lineal, based on the past, present and the future whose moments are punctuated by dates. At present, we believe that the past is a collection of events that have happened, are behind us and are no more. At the same time, we also believe that the future is in a time and space ahead of us, ungraspable and never in the now. The angel comes to bring Timelessness to earth.

It is shoes and feet that lead one through life, either to safety or to one’s demise. My research into shoes has lead me to develop my feminist theories which extends to my visual artworks too. I began to explore Freud’s Oedipus complex and castration anxiety as well as fairy tales such as Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Red Shoes.” They have been integral to my long term photo and video series “Self-Destructive Female Icons” and their genealogical relationship to the goddess Aphrodite (conceived from a castration). Iconological meanings in our contemporary society have shifted value in the last 100 years and now canter nefariously along the wiggly and confusing road of fame, worship, envy, glamour and capitalism.  On an everyday level, women who wear high heels could represent a fetishist type of patriarchal oppression with castration anxiety at its helm. The long term physical harm high heels can cause feet (being phallic), legs and even the spine make the phrase, “my feet are killing me!” quite literal. 

“Smells Like Teen Spirit” (2009) is simultaneously, an homage to and critique of the production of the images of 1970s, American male teen idols whose posters adorned the walls of millions of maturing girls. Long-haired and often androgynous stars like Leif Garrett, Michael Jackson, Scott Baio, Andy Gibb, and most popular of all, David Cassidy, whet the hormonal appetites of schoolgirls all over the world. Images torn out from teen mags were cellotaped onto bedroom walls and became altarpieces to not only sex, but also a sophisticated form of advertising amounting to lucrative dividends for the music industry, but at a high price for the singer. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is concerned with the biographical paradox between the image of the artist, versus the real story of the person behind it. Many of the artists in this series were child stars,who took the almost obligatory road to ruin through drug abuse. As much as it is a cliché, too much fame too fast and too young often seems to result in the poisoning of the individual’s perspective on life where fame is mistaken for love. Magazines like Teen Beat and Tiger Beat were there to water the budding sexualities of pubescent girls. They played an important part in the pop machine and not only on teenagers’ fantasies. But if pop eats its young, as Michael Hutchence, singer of INXS, ominously said, who then, is the daddy?