Last week I tore down all the past work in my studio to be able to start a fresh. I realised that I had also taken some photos which I will display below of the aftermath. It felt liberating to start a raw canvas and erratically get rid of the past work I had been doing that I felt was bogging me down.

It also sparked some new ideas in me and worked upon some late night ideas I had already had. Starting a new project is always a tough one to break into, so I had been taking my camera around with me as often as I could for quick photos. I came across this very menacing splatter of what looks like a red-brown substance.

It was right next to the very tall art building of my university and it just looked very sinister, yet intriguing.

I've had a few ideas come to me late at night, to do with the idea of the 'Fallen Woman' and biblical imagery. The term the 'Fallen Woman' appears to me to describe a woman who has 'lost her innocence' and fallen from the grace of God. The terms 'Jezebel' and 'Harlot' get thrown around a lot and I think I can relate it to my own experiences in the modern day, and slut shaming. I have briefly been part of works where I have played the character of Mary Magdalene in my friends fashion photography portfolio.

I've also been briefly looking into the 'Magdalene Laundries' of the past and the kind of women that were sent there. I was reminded of the 2002 film 'The Magdalene Sisters', a very powerful film about 4 teenage girls sent to an Irish asylum in order to be 'redeemed'

I feel very strongly about these kind of institutes, and the attitudes towards women in the past when they were promiscuous, adulterous and disgraced for having sex before marriage. My own grandmother was a victim of these ridiculous opinions and had to secretly give away her first born to society as she was not married. The work I will make towards this theme will be very personal and experiment with performance.
I've chosen to branch out into performance as it's unknown and briefly investigated territory to me, and I feel that the work will translate better through this medium.
Also I witnessed my first ever live performance piece a few weeks ago at the Manchester Art Gallery. They hosted a night called 'In Emergency Break Glass: The Feminist Takeover', where several happenings occurred over the night. In one of the galleries we were led in to surround an artist called Riike Enna and witnessed her performance 'Future of Venus'. We saw Enna being covered in white modroc, completely cut off from her surrounding and standing in emulation of a marble statue.

I stood quite near to this piece and as time passed we saw Enna start to wobble and grow agitated in this white casing. She started to hyperventilate, then fell to the ground, cracking the modroc. She started to rip off all of the bandages and chalky substance from her body until we were confronted with this womans complete naked body. She started to realise her surroundings and slowly gathered up all the modroc she had torn off her body and screamed. She kicked the pile into the audience and calmly walked off in almost defiance. I found this performance very powerful. It didn't feel acted, it felt like the artist had been reborn during her performance. She went from a fragile statue to an angsty woman angered by the fact she had ben bound up. The setting of the piece was perfect, she was surrounded by old paintings by males of the past, that in my opinion have forced women into a certain form in art.
Further on my own ideas for performance, I've planned to emulate Enna's piece in its sudden agitation. I plan to enter a room that contains a set up of a bucket of water and white laundry. I will come in, fall to my knees and begin scrubbing these already clean garments. I plan to scrub until my hands bleed, somehow by doing this with prosthetics. This piece will also imitate Marina Abramovic's 'Balkan Baroque' where she sat scrubbing cow bones for 6 hours a day.

The piece brought out a lot of emotion in Abramovic as she told stories of Belgrade where she was born. I want relate my emotion of scrubbing the clothes back to the feelings of the women of the past who were shamed for their personal lives. I will possibly wear a red dress to contrast the white garments I will try to wash, yet stain with my own impurities. As I mentioned before, my ideas have had links to biblical imagery, such as stigmata's. This is where sores, pains or blood pours from the palms of the hands, corresponding to the wounds created by Jesus's crucifixion. After watching David Bowie's rather contraversial music video for 'The Next Day' I was inspired by the scene where a character who is in reference to Mary Magdalene suddenly spurts blood from her palms. She is initially portrayed as an alluring woman stood drinking alone in a shady nightclub, until a priest dances with her and she begins to erratically fall to the ground suffering a stigmata.

She is suddenly reborn and is more pure in appearance, like that of the Virgin Mary.

 I feel that all the information I have gathered so far can be stitched together in order to create my performance. I'm very excited to work upon in it, and hope I can present it successfully as part of this unit.