Rachel R Glover

My term began with a homage to my ideas from second year; environmentalism, conservation, and a love of birds, with an installation piece named ‘Blatant Symbolism’. I wanted to depict an uncomfortable foreshadowing of our eventual, self-inflicted doom. This piece allowed me to move to new ideas whilst maintaining a continuity in my practice.

My next piece explored the idea of environmentalism through crowd control; an interactive performance piece named ‘Eat your sins’. I was still interested in using rubbish as a medium, and wanted to convey more viscerally how humanity will be the cause of its own demise. This consisted of a skull-headed janitor sweeping rubbish – and the audience – into a dark room. Originally, the skull was the same one used in ‘Blatant Symbolism’. However, I had the opportunity to perform this piece again in the first exhibition of the year, this time using a more abstract character with a bin-bag head. My studio group collectively created our own vintage cinema named ‘Maud’s Cabinet of Wonders’. I was able to change the performance slightly by acting as the cinema janitor, sweeping away the audience alongside a mountain of litter, allowing the performance to fit the context of the exhibition. My influences for these pieces included the performative work of Oliver Herring.

I continued to experiment with performance with a piece named ‘Redacted’, using the same character from my previous performances. I entertained the idea that perhaps humanity can be saved through submission to what they have created, and was interested to see how far I could go in inducing audience submission.

In order to diversify the medium of my work, I created a series of video projections that developed my ideas of the head and the body. Influenced by Marianna Simnets’ ‘Blood in my Milk’ exhibition, I explored ideas of self destruction, bodily discomfort, gristle and autocannibalism through a series of abject video pieces.

I carried these ideas into my final piece for the External After Dark Exhibition, which consisted of a collaborative performance piece with my coursemate Natalie Sired. I was eager to end the term with a performance piece that carried more power than ever; the collaborative aspect of the piece allowed us this. In order to create it, we combined our ideas; mine of viscera and the body, and Natalie’s ideas of feminism and voyeurism. We, as living, breathing women, aimed to destroy a patriarchal societies’ idea of the ‘ideal woman’ – a creature to be sexualised and commodified. We sexualise our movements and actions as we do this; embracing our own sexuality whilst simultaneously rejecting the sexuality thrust upon us.

In the new term, I decided to experiment with the Bin-bag character I had created, giving it different levels of dimension, acknowledgement, and life. My piece for the Spring Exhibition, ‘Algernon’, was the result of this experimentation. Eventually, I decided it was appropriate for me to kill off this character, as done through my artwork, in order to allow me to focus my practice on my growing interest in abjection and the body.

Once again I experimented with ideas of bodily discomfort and queasiness, this time taking a more direct approach by depicting the peeling of skin and the loss of teeth. These pieces were also influenced by Simnets’ ‘Blood in my Milk’ Exhibition. My final piece, ‘Dermatillomania’, was developed from this experimentation. This will consist of a performance piece in which the audience are invited to peel ‘skin’ from the back of a frail grey creature, in a small dark room. The piece acts as a culmination of the ideas I have developed throughout the year.