Colour Bleed

In this performance I interact with the public to enact an action painting.  Wearing my own body weight in bags of coloured water, I walk up and down a white cloth as the audience pick at the bags with toothpicks, as if I am the hors d'oeuvre.

I symbolically bleed colour to represent mixed cultural origins and identity, to represent multiple relationships and origins. The liquids gush from the bags, as if bodily fluids are pouring out of me, bile, urine, blood, puss, digestive juices. Momentarily making beautiful what is unappealing, the colours combine on the white fabric ground before merging into a brown sludge. Inspired by the take-away drinks in plastic bags that are ubiquitous in parts of Southeast Asia, I use coloured liquids to reference blood performances and Action Painting. Whilst Performance Artists often use their own blood to emphasise inner identity and human fragility, my performance is an imaginary blood-letting ritual styled on a fashion parade of sorts, a “United Colours”. This work takes inspiration from the bleeding performances of Artist Franko B.

Whilst there is sensationalism and risk in blood performances, my concerns are with the mundane and with issues of waste and pollution and the excess of fashion hype and promotional politics. I invite the audience to puncture the bags and release the flow of liquid. It is a collaboration creating a “cloak of many colours”, but the beauty is short-lived, as the colours merge to murky ground. 

Performance. Materials: 65 litres liquid food colouring dyes mixed with water, 130 plastic bags, string, plastic hose harness, buckets, white costume, 20 metre white fabric walkway, bamboo toothpicks.