Felt is the Past Tense of Feel 2006
(Photograph, Performance still, 200cm x 100cm)
In this performance I position myself astride a pile of squid. I have shrouded my Father's business suit in pink felt and choosing one squid at a time I suck out the ink and spit it on my costume. Simulating the squid's natural defence mechanism of squirting the ink so it can disappear constitutes an act of erasure and is a cathartic re-enactment of my father's death. The performance stills capture the trauma of witnessing the prolonged death of a loved one suffering with cancer. Empathising with my father's painful ordeal through performance enabled me to externalise my grief. Purging the repressed emotion that my family had collectively "sucked up" challenges social taboos surrounding, illness, mourning and death.
by Kelly Gellatly, Curator of Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Victoria
This performance work, and the photograph that documents it, is a powerful evocation of pain, trauma and death enacted in a confronting, bodily and visceral way. This piece externalises and in effect ‘works through' issues surrounding the death of the artist's father while similarly foregrounding the ongoing impact of illness, mourning and death.
