Méta Femmes br@nchées 1 – Hayley Newman

Participants

Invited curator: Sylvie Gilbert

For the first event in the series 3 Méta Femmes br@nchées, Studio XX was pleased to welcome to Montréal the British performance artist Hayley Newman.

Hayley presented 3 performances: Shot in the Dark , Crystalline III and Hook and Eye. These three works encompass artificial light and the amplification of sound, putting the emphasis on the effects produced by them. With the aid of costumes that she makes from basic technologies, Newman transforms herself into a body of sound and light before our eyes. She becomes an entity who literally disappears in the space and the relocates herself. She wires herself by amplifying her body, her gestures and her postures in order to make herself audible beyond her voice.

Hayley Newman began her performance work in 1994 with Kiss (an amplified smooch) and Record at the monthly held club night Nosepaint in south London. Her solo performance works, which generally involve physical sound elements presented in direct relation to the body, includes Microphone Skirt (1995), Tour (1995), Kalte Schulter (1995), Suicide Cat (1995), Shot in the Dark (1996), Crystalline 1 & II (1997) and the most recent body of performances titled Three Weeks without Crutches which took place in a bandstand as part of the exhibition Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea hosted by MUU Gallery (Helsinki) and Beaconsfielfd (London).

She has worked collaboratively in 1997 with the writer Robert Ellis and performance artist Bruce Gilchrist, and has a long term collaborative relationship with Hamburg based filmmaker Nina Koennemann under the name Malcolm & lily. Their works include That’s Why They’re Doing it, a begging happening on the Berlin Underground (1995) World of Sex sleepwalking on the Reeperbahn, Hamburg (1995) and Donnerwetter a miniature thunderstorm performed in the street during Performa ’97, Berlin.

Hayley Newman was born in 1969. She completed her postgraduate diploma in 1994 at the Slade School of Art in London, taught by Stuart Brisley and was awarded a DAAD scholarship in 1995 to work in the class of Marina Abramovic at the Hochschüle fur Bildende Kunste in Hamburg. She currently holds the Stanley Burton Practical Ph.D. Research Scholarship at Leeds University and is a visiting teacher at Chelsea College of Art in London.

Commentary (en français) and images:
http://www.studioxx.org/f/programming/FemmesBranchees/1998/metaFB/hayley_comment.html

This project received support from The Canada Council for the Arts.