Australian artist recreates Chinese water torture

9 Oct 2012, 2:00 pm   -   Source: Michelle Hanna, SBS
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An Australian artist has endured a seven hour performance of water torture to convey the anxiety she felt after the loss of her sister.

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By Michelle Hanna

On a white bed in a Sydney gallery at the weekend, artist Lottie Consalvo lay in a white nightgown, under a white boat suspended from the rafters, from which a black liquid would drip, drip, drip onto her forehead, for seven hours.

The 27-year-old artist says the black liquid represented the dark matter of the mind, especially those thoughts that can overwhelm one at night.

The idea for the work came from a time of intense anxiety and sleeplessness after the passing of her sister by suicide.

"I think it became more scary because I knew what it could lead to. I'd always gone through these periods throughout my life but had never realised how serious it could become," Ms Consalvo says.

"And so I remember lying in bed and I had to get my husband to tell me stories to get me to sleep. And I'd want this story about a sunroom in Australia.

How many stories can you tell about a sunroom?" "Sometimes it would help me but most of the time, he'd fall off to sleep and I'd go 'I'm really alone, I'm so scared and I don't know how to escape this head' and I just kept analysing and analysing it," she explains.

"And I think that's where the piece came from - definitely where this piece came from - just lying in the bed and feeling like I just couldn't stop the torture of my head."

Ms Consalvo says she does not rehearse her performances so that they are 'honest' and she did not know what to expect from this piece until she experienced the first three drops on her forehead.

Each drop felt like a 'boom!' and she immediately thought she could not do it, but talked herself to continue on.

"I went though stages of total discomfort and then to this place, I went to this beautiful place at one stage where the drops were going on my head, really cold, and then falling onto my eye, and warming up in there, and then dripping (down the side of my face) like a tear, and it felt like I was crying."

She also experienced the thought of lying next to her deceased sister on the bed, the place where she died, being near the blackness she associated with her sister's death.

"The piece felt so real and so right because I went into all those places," she says.

She came to the idea of Chinese water torture, which can cause psychosis, through its association with the head, which for her represents the physicality of the mind - something she believes is "more physical than anything in life".

The boat, from which the performance gets its title 'Steer a Steady Ship', represents the saying she was often told when growing up, meaning to hold oneself together and maintain focus.

The performance is part of a larger exhibition of Consalvo's work called 'The Life Exchange', about the "transition from grief and death into life and prosperity, about this transition from losing my sister to now having a child".

Dark, disturbing paintings and sculptures carry titles such as 'We have ended the world to start again', 'She ended where you began' and 'Leave my guts for the birds' and conclude with a video showing Consalvo dancing in her wedding dress on a beach to signal the start of new life as she is now five months pregnant with her first child.

Her performance on the weekend is reminiscent of the 'endurance' style of the self-proclaimed 'grandmother of performance art', New York-based Montenegrin Marina Abramović, who once sat in a gallery for over 700 hours for one piece.

However, Consalvo says she is really inspired by the late Cuban artist Ana Mendieta, who would connect herself to the earth for her feminist and autobiographical works known as 'earth body' art.

For her next work, Ms Consalvo is interested in developing a piece that deals with the mental health of men.

Water Torture

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