 Maen nhw ni hollwyddi. Diolch i fy Gerd-Lewisys i chi, reviewu ben yw'r mewn i amgyrgwm yn cynnwys yn hollwyddi. Rydw i gondol, rydyn ni'n cael ei roi'n gweithio'r mewn ysgolol i fynd i'n sefydliad yrten nhon ac yn gwneud hynny, ac yn ysgrifennu ddesunio'n ei hynny i'r reitbwys. Mae sydd gen i'u adeiladion popeth o ffotoethau, I'm going to present, it's about developing a language for a lived experience that's very difficult to articulate. It's not often discussed and it's hard to find a vocabulary for. So I'm going to show a selection of works relating to that from the last eight years approximately. Hopefully there are works that kind of invite a dialogue about this experience and similar experiences. For me I really hold that intention with a desire for the artworks to kind of be good artworks in and of themselves and not only about kind of eliciting a response that's like sympathy or empathy that hopefully they kind of operate on another level as well. And there's also a tension that's about making yourself vulnerable by sharing the experiences but also kind of knowing like for me I really appreciate that I have this way of dealing with things that I've experienced and I know that if I didn't have this outlet the whole situation would be a lot harder to process. So that's the kind of context that I'm coming from I suppose. So the first work that I want to show is actually, it was made before I realised that I couldn't have children and it's a work called Collapsing Deities. I made a lot of different iterations of it. This iteration was at Spike Island in Bristol. The format of the performances that I come into the space was like an IKEA bag full of props and costumes and I dress up as lots of different characters from kind of Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman traditions so different deities and saints. And I guess at this point I already had an interest in depicting things that are difficult to visualise like they don't exist or they're invisible if they do exist. And I was also thinking about archetypal characters. So the form of the performances I dress up as all these things one at a time and then I make hybrids and obviously one of the key archetypes that you get in all cultures really is the great mother. But looking back at this image now I obviously see myself with this cardboard baby and I see this kind of desire to fulfil or inhabit this ideal image of motherhood is kind of creeping into my life as well as into my practice. And around this time Marina Warner's book Alone of All Her Sex which is a fantastic book about Virgin Mary and if anyone is interested in that and hasn't read it I'd really recommend it. That book was really important to me and I was making a lot of works that were about inhabiting that image of Mary and this sort of led to me making this performance to many Mary's where I put on all the Virgin Mary costumes that I had which at this point is loads. And the first time I made it again it was like before I realised I couldn't have children and it was just this kind of like oh I've become this artist that dresses up as the Virgin Mary I'll take it to its logical conclusion and put on all the costumes but they've become this kind of big soft sculpture kind of ridiculous sort of caricature almost and then the second time I made the work in 2019 and then the third time which was last year at Free's Art Fair the weight of the costumes suddenly changed and it was like a physical burden that to me this idea of this woman who gets miraculously pregnant had become a burden on me is something that I think about a lot and so yeah the costumes pile up and up in it and the physical weight is really analogous to that and then the end of the performances I sort of wrestle out of them all. So I had this kind of increasing interest in goddess worship and also trying to use performance as a way to invoke like playfully invoke a character or like what if I go to this space and try and like revivify something of this deity so this performance was filmed at Edison, Northern Greece where a goddess called Ma was venerated and so yeah kind of like thinking about performance as a way to activate a space which in some ways I think I've realized is maybe similar to like the process of IVF there's these gametes in the lab and they're like waiting to be transformed like to come alive so kind of thinking about performance in a sacred or pseudo sacred space as a way to kind of like energize that and then the first work that I then made that was really kind of deliberately about what I was going through is this piece Easter Eats Estradiol and Easter is a pagan goddess associated with spring and her name has been appropriated for Christian Festival of Easter she's shown with bunnies or hairs and eggs which obviously Easter has kind of cannibalized as well and so an Estradiol was a medicine that I was taking for IVF like you take it to control your menstrual cycle and so I was kind of imagining like what if these fertility goddesses like had to take the drugs because you know they didn't really like they couldn't do it without them so this is the first kind of deliberately auto ethnographic work where I was like I felt like not many people were making work about this stuff which I now know isn't necessarily the case but it's a very isolating experience and I kind of wanted to do something that was about maybe normalizing the conversation around it this work was made between my first and second rounds of IVF and it was also made around the time that my mum died so I guess like motherhood in all my ways in relation to motherhood kind of embedded in this piece of work so again there's this sense of like performing as these characters but also there's this ambivalence between a scientific approach and a faith-based approach whether that's a kind of like canonical religion or whether it's something more folkloric so the soundtrack is like a voice-over of folkloric advice and also kind of incantatory readings from these documents that you get given called IVF injection teach which some people in the room might be familiar with that tell you how to take the drugs I'm not screening this work today but if anyone wants to see it I can send you a link and then this hospital curtain backcloth is kind of a compositional device stolen from Renaissance mother and child paintings but there's often a kind of backcloth that's called a cloth of honour it's something I've used quite a lot in this version it's a hospital curtain so then I made a series of live performances called Approaching Veritas and Veritas is a concept associated with the medieval mystic and polymath Hildegard of Bingen who's a character I'm really fascinated by and it's this idea of this green and green life force within everything so I was sort of situating these works in these kind of gardens and greenhouses this one's actually dried out well so these spaces where things should be flourishing I suppose this costume is based on a kind of Catholic pagan hybrid called the Madonna of the Wheat she's like a sort of harvest Madonna and then this version at Chiswick House and Gardens is like a very slow crawl towards a kind of big greenhouse with this bundle of synthetically dyed wheat so I guess thinking quite a lot about what's natural and what's synthesized or kind of like amped up chemically so that was a series of live works and then it culminated in this performance for camera approaching Veritas epilogue which was made really as a sort of lament after I had all the rounds of IVF that I did didn't work and really what I was trying to do is kind of try and develop a free associative language for something that's very difficult to talk about in normal language so there's lots of kind of iconography embedded in the costumes and everything which I won't go into all of now but just in this example this hospital gown with the pelican pecking itself it's an early Christian symbol called the pelican and its piety where they believed that pelicans pecked themselves and fed the chicks with their blood so it's a self-sacrificial image but I'd seen this heraldic shield in a cathedral where the pelican is just pecking itself and it's got no young so obviously I really related to you so this gesture felt like this gesture of injecting yourself in the stomach because I'd been doing a lot so the work contains all these kind of thwarted objects and characters so there's like an egg that won't crack and a breast that won't lactate and there's Mermaid who wants to do the splits and it has readings of Hildegard of Bingham's kind of poem prayers as this kind of voiceover and they're all to do with like the Virgin Mary as this branch thick with leaves so again this image of kind of miraculous fecundity and there's also this improvised movement of this holding this absent infant this is a more recent work that actually isn't really expressly about these experiences so much but I'm just including this one image here the works called Enclosed Garden which is like one of the names of the Virgin Mary as the Hortus Conclusus or Enclosed Garden and there's a kind of quite obscure medieval image of Mary where when the angel Gabriel arrives to tell her she's going to be pregnant she is apparently spinning the thread to make the temple curtain and there's lots of things in this video that are performed kind of backwards or undone but my protagonist she's like unraveling and no angels appearing and it's the sense of waiting for the miracle that never happens it's going to race through a few paintings they're all painted with my mum was a painter, Rebecca Hind and when she died I cleared her studio and I kept a lot of her materials so they're all actually made with her materials and they have a lot of leaking, bleeding crying kind of qualities to them and then yeah I'm just going to show this short video work song on her it's only been shown in a small online exhibition during the pandemic it hasn't really been shown publicly before maybe I won't say too much about it maybe I'll just play it for you thank you