Performance commissioned for The window art space in Union Arcade, High Street, Birmingham, 2006
Wearing my wedding dress and armed with lcoally made HP sauce, I performed a fond farewell; not only for HP sauce which is no longer made in Birmingham, but to Birmingham itself as I finally moved to Cornwall. It was a farewell gesture to the wedding dress (which was ruined after this performance) and to domestic moments that are always sweet, bitter and ambivalent.
Filling the the space with indexical HP kisses (the window, walls and wedding dress…) it was a grafittiesque and painful greeting and goodbye. The HP sauce made my lips so sore and swollen that I eventually l couldn’t continue. This domestic and emotive private performance in a public space created an exchange that parodied the contradictory experience of domesticity and care. The timeless symbol of the kiss becomes a strange tribute to gendered tenderness and trauma.
Explore other representations of women and motherhood in public space.