I have been exploring otherworldly spaces in the context of performance and the performative within my art practice. Experiencing the role of the artist as both creator, director and performer – I have begun building a cosmology through the linking of objects and ideas, a cultivated web of interrelationships. My method of working has been flexible; spanning object, live performance and video, but always with a focus on the performative. Ritual as performance seemed an appropriate space to interact with the otherworldy, while also allowing the work to quite naturally manifest across a range of media.

Working with the performative – particularly recorded performance – I have discovered a method that allows for the sublime, the unnerving and the amusing to exist side by side in a contemporary art context. It has been an evolutionary process, with branches on my ‘cosmology tree’ growing and joining to create a scaffold of ideas and symbols.

This has been a process of uncovering, or discovering, these interrelationships as much as it is of creating them. The objects and materials being performed in the videos I have made in the last 2 years were recurrent from previous sculptural object-based works. The meaning and materials of my objects have followed me into the more performance-based work and have started to create an extended constellation of ideas that is building upon itself as a cosmology.

When delving into realms of the otherworldly, it is sometimes necessary to suspend doubt (even if not to admit belief) so that one can fully engage with the experience. To the curious mind, exploration of a question can be as fulfilling, if not more so, than attainment of an answer. Perhaps art can be used like a scryer’s black mirror, a refracted vision of ourselves that gives us a view into the unknown.

Mary MacGregor-Reid
2016