Ouroboros tells a visual story of the relationship between artist and creation. This performance was created in collaboration with my dear friend and experienced performance artist Lauren Davis, whose 15+ years of work as a Butoh and flesh hook suspension performer in LA and the Bay area, helped facilitate a first time performance piece for my first solo art show. This vision could not have happened without her. She was also the art piece that I created during this performance.

The seedling of this piece was growing in me months before the opening of the show, and I while I had shared it with Lauren, it wasn’t until the weekend before the opening that a concept would make itself known to us.

When we started talking about the concept, I asked Lauren what her own vision was, and her response was that she wanted to become one of my artworks, that the goal was to be an empty vessel, able to allow my intention as an artist to come into her and to let that come alive and explore it within her own body. I designed Laurens draped costume to frame the front of the torso where I would be painting the most, and backstage we applied her usual Butoh paint, black hands and feet and white on the body to represent ashes, but in this context also a blank canvas. Black sclera lenses and tooth paint were applied and thanks to Halloween being right around the corner, we were able to snag up some latex devil horns and attach those to the chest, to preinstall my motif of the horns nipples that appears in most of my figurative work.

Truly, it was born from a mutual appreciation of each others art forms and a shared love of flesh hooks, piercing, and an understanding of ritualized pain for transmutation. We were exchanging energy in a design that mimicked the creative act; which is ineffable without the vehicle of storytelling. A story in movement, embodied in ecstatic pain rites, revealing the deafening intimate tension between a creative hand and its work. It is my own experience that ideas are alive, that they have a will and a movement as a force of nature, of the universe. It is my experience that they want to be made real, and that they seek out a suitable person to do that work, someone of like nature, of frequency and compatibility. I seek them, too.

The artist connects with an idea that wants to be brought into the world, and breathes life into it. I am a lightning rod, made of hollow bones and humble hands. Fumbling in the dark, rendering something I cannot yet hold. Instructed, possessed, visited, beckoned. An alchemy occurred between our combined desires and visions. The story we were telling each other started to unfold. She wanted to become one of my art pieces, and I wanted to embody a reenactment of what my process truly feels like.

That brings us to the correct question. A deeper, existential interrogation; what are you willing to do, what are you willing to give? What are you made of?

This performance is my answer to that question.