I make participatory performance projects, including theatre, installations, site-based and walking events.
The work is playful and irreverent, and explores the sensory, the landscape, and the ways audiences can create and negotiate meaning. I make performance to address the limitations of language, my fascination with identity politics, and my desire to illuminate and document the performative in daily life.
I am currently developing Live Art walking practices around the personal geographies and the intimate (and simultaneously very public) performances associated with parenting
The Pilgrimage of the Prodigal Daughter.
When my daughter was 9 months old, I finally admitted that I hated baby groups. In a desperate attempt to do something more meaningful, I decided to walk the 50 miles to my mother’s house, carrying my baby daughter on my back. This performance is an attempt to explain why; a kind of practice run for an inevitable future conversation. Another form of performance is made from the ephemera of the first, and like any work composed from remnants, it can’t ever be faithful to the original. That time, those physical and emotional places, those feelings have passed now and only fragments remain. On different days, I would probably tell her different things anyway.
Incorporating digital recordings, tweets, and a good deal of wry humour, each performance of this one-woman show is a unique event, each audience collaborating in creating film for the future. Frank and disarming, it will appeal to anybody who has ever tried to navigate a totally new route and wondered how others made it look easy.
Maternity Leaves.
Maternity Leaves explores the visceral and performative intersections between Live Art documentation and maternal ambivalence through photographs taken within a mile of my home over the first year of my daughter’s life. These (not quite) solitary walks offered precious time for Rousseau-ian reverie, for a performer to reflect on the choice to become a mother through an invisible performance which interrogated the boundaries of this new role.
What began as a personal dare to take a few more steps away from my co-performer than was emotionally comfortable became an intentional act of provocation, sometimes in the moment and sometimes with an eye on the resulting document. Though witnessed by an audience of passers-by, my performance was perceived as the social enactment of walking as a leisure rather than artistic practice. The image titles, detailing the number of steps taken, are a plaintiff acknowledgement of my ultimate responsibility, but in querying our spatial proxemics I was making a deliberate and conscious statement; my transgressive behaviour both troubling definitions of a “good” mother and challenging the viewers’ right to tell me what that means. The difference between “ah, look, a mother photographing her baby” and “what the hell is she doing?!” is only a few paces.
Lizzie Philps is a PhD candidate at Exeter University, researching walking art practices and the creative maternal. Lizzie makes performance projects including theatre, installations, site-based and walking events.
More about Lizzie
Lizzie Philps is a PhD candidate at Exeter University, researching walking art practices and the creative maternal. Lizzie makes performance projects including theatre, installations, site-based and walking events.
