e. m. alysse bowd

Three scoops of raspberry ice cream begin to melt as temptation is resisted. Across the ocean my lover devours three scoops of raspberry ice cream. Like staring at the moon knowing that the moon is shared. A portal, a connector. Ice cream is the currency of love, of childhood, of indulgence.

This performance is about practicing opposition in the face of temptation and desire.

This is what I want but will not allow.

This is what I reject, but submit to.

Self control, self discipline — a practice learned through diet rituals. Patience, moderation, balance. The melting ice-cream aging into a puddle on the ground unable to ever become its former sculpture. Narcissus stares into the raspberry puddle - despair and longing.

Take and eat, eat and drink

the sun is torrid and you can cool down

eat and drink

you must cool down

please calm down

eat and drink

the sun is worried, come sit and cool down.

This performance is rooted in a discussion of motherhood, self sustainability, feral flowers and innumerable wishes. The dandelion is an edible flowering weed, a feral urban flower that resiliently bursts through concrete and optimistically blooms bright yellow in opposition of the gardeners instinct to rip them from the soil.

I allowed my body to become an apprehensive nursery log, a fallen tree whose nutrients fuel the growth of other plants and yet uncertain in my role I begin to consume the flowers. I began therefore to consume the unwished wishes that the dandelion possesses. Each seed a potential wish cast into the wind, now a yellow sludge inside my stomach.

Brush your hair one hundred times a day, she said. Let the teeth scrape back the dry skin on your scalp, gnawing at your skull - an old wives tale, a truth, a routine, an obsession. Like the tooth of the comb let the teeth of a saw brush one hundred times against your flesh. Like the little insults you repeat to yourself one hundred times a day. Just as absurd as the hundred routines you keep out of hope, out of expectation, out of obedience. Pampered, a moment of self care, the saw left lines across your body, cultivating the fertile soil.

100 Times a Day layers imagery of vanity, self care, self harm and blind obsession. After brushing my hair 100 times I plait my hair and wrap it across my eyes as a blindfold. The blindfold acts to heighten my senses, but also allows me to feel alone while being observed as I use the patriarchal saw to cultivate my flesh. The saw, a tool, a weapon threatens its potential while I slowly and gently press teeth to flesh. A different routine, a similar obsession, both absurd, one hundred times a day.

ring around the rosie, pocket full of poesy

ring a ring a rosie

husha husha

loves me, loves me not

we all fall down.

ashes in the water ashes in the sea

ashes ashes

we a fall down.

mamma had a baby and her head popped off

and her head popped off

and her head popped off.

mamma had a baby and her head popped off

buttercups and daisies gentlemen and ladies

we all pop up

her head popped off.

loves me not

loves me

loves me not

loves me

pocket full of poesy

butter cups and daisies

gentlemen and ladies

we all pop up

her head popped off

mamma had a baby and her head popped off.

and her head popped off

ashes ashes

ashes in the water

ashes in the sea

ashes in the morning milk

we all fell down

ring around the rosie, pockets full of poesy

loves me

loves me not

loves me

loves me not

loves me

loves me not

loves me

loves me not

husha husha

we all fall down.

Like a Saw in a Birthday Cake is an absurd personification of a cake walk, of diet rituals, and the danger of obsessions. It is inspired by a quote from “A Complicated Kindness” where Miriam Toews describes a character as, “There was something seething inside of her, something fierce and unpredictable, like a saw in a birthday cake.” This simile aligns the sharp rugged dangers of the saw blade with the delicate iced gown of a birthday cake. This performance explores this duplicity while ruminating with feminine routines of self-control and self-care.

Toews, Miriam. A Complicated Kindness: A Novel. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2004. p.9

In the middle of a silent Finnish forest was a large stone altar. A layered white cake pearled with lingonberries was nestled on a plate of green moss. The feral flower as the wild and the delicate in one being holding the capacity to be strong, decisive and desperate for survival juxtaposed with the feminine figure - a mashing of two selves. The Feral Flower is a conversation about instinct, expectation and female survival.

The Measure of a Scream describes the exact length one can run during the duration of a full exhaled scream.

This performance is exploring what the power and energy of a scream can be used for, in this case how far can a single scream transport you.

In a silent Finnish forest, she ran for 7.0 seconds until a single scream concluded.

She had always been able to see screams. They weren’t the same consistency as the rest of the air. Sometimes they hung like fog, formidable and persuasive, but there were lavish screams as well, and ones that seemed to have been released from a balloon. These balloon screams would sprint through a room bouncing and colliding, unaware and unapologetic. Screams are selfish creatures and she was responsible for them. She new what they were capable of and their particular marriage of poison and solace. She was a Scream Catcher.

A repeated ritual before bed, a dismissal of the anxieties, pressures, and emotional strife consumed and cultivated throughout the day, the Scream Catchers is the performance of a new invention of the everyday, a new ceramic ritual, a quotidian act of self care. Screams are exhaled into oversized porcelain funnels. The porcelain wetted by breath escorts the screams to a porcelain canister where the content and energy is sealed. Once a villainous exhale is now a harvested energy full of new potential. 

Disguised words, dipped in gold, seeping sweetness. 

A ritual of purification, an act of permanence. 

She chews the secret, 

swallows. 

None are terribly palatable. 

The Secret Eater consumes the secrets of others, each secret released from its owner becomes a part of her. This mythical heroine provides the catharsis of confession. Those secrets, confessed on paper, dipped in honey are released from their owner, relieving the owner of their obligation, their emotional weight, their labour of concealment, the toil of their secret. 

She ate that too, is the dismantling of a dollhouse, a toy used to teach women how to run a home, this structure allows for the potential rebuilding, and reinvention of the idealized dollhouse. The house is now a distorted symbol. The domestic, a contrariety of warmth and comfort and yet social expectation and entrapment. She ate that too, is a feminist reference to a metaphorical hunger to progress and accomplish echoed by the patriarchal fear of the potential of that unrestrained appetite. Contemporary women experience the ability to pursue a career and education and yet the inability to guiltlessly avoid the expectation of motherhood and domestic perfection. 

She became the dwelling itself. A reoccurring dream, imagined from the fear of what motherhood and the resulting domesticity would steal from her. The home, a thief of identity, an equal opponent dragging her beneath the long window curtains, a slow consumption of who she had been. A house where the head had lived. A house wife. A mind palace. The parasitic growth upon her shoulders. She ate her way through the home in retaliation, swallowing everything whole. Bloated as if pregnant.   

Figure tumbling, chewing cud, she regurgitates the dining room table, a lampshade and parts of a bed frame. Furrowed brow, the rooms are empty, her stomach growling. 

The Pink Cloudless is a digestion of the female archetypal dormancy between Maiden and Motherhood. This assumed hibernation acts like the pressing of a flower by threatening to preserve and stagnate the subject. Exploring the notion of both a literal and emotional interior life, the heroine of The Pink Cloudless engages with the dichotomy of the home. The home, like the tower or the fence both serves to protect but also imprison, at the same time claustrophobic and yet comforting, a physical symbol of the potential contrariety of the domestic. 

The Pink Cloudless is the cyclical yearning for something that is always out of reach it is infused with personal mythology, female perfectionism, self care and an exploration of the possibility for abstraction in everyday objects.

Flowers are an accelerated timeline. She blooms, she fades, she's been deflowered - lifetime condensed into the dying of a flower. A vocabulary of flowers defined by the Victorian flower oracle. A secret form of communication. Two blind-folded women, veiled, masked, disguised. One wears a house upon her shoulders, the other wears her house upon her back. A growth, a weight, two snails dragging their home wherever they go. A house and a Wife. A mind palace to store and organize memory. A room of ones own. Houses wrapped to women like infants strapped to their mothers. 

The Pink Cloudless is a performance that discusses the labours of womanhood, a confused state caught between archetypal labels, questioning, defying, embracing the expectation of motherhood, the fear of regret, the loss of identity. 

Sleep Walks and Days Dreamt is the binding of the female figure and a dwelling, with houses wrapped to woman like infants strapped to their mothers, like snails with their shells. These drawings embody the pairing of the words mind palace and house wife - both phrases linking the figure with the architecture of the home.

Reflecting on the voids between traditional female archetypes - maiden, mother, crone - I reflect and speculate, I fear and am curious about the next societal label for my body, that of mother. These drawings explore this speculation about my body becoming a dwelling for another human while simultaneously securing a mind palace of crucial, individual identity.

Standing inside a cloth tower, feet fenced by porcelain, five girls create a soundscape of self-soothing, a melody of humming, whispers, stories and sighs — inspired by the sounds we make to comfort and occupy ourselves when left in solitude, trapped and protected in our cloth ivory tower. The soundscape softens and the girls pull the cloth towers up the sides of their body and over their head, shedding a layer of clothing, the fabric tower folds and falls. A garment on the bedroom floor, the shedding of another layer of skin.

The porcelain fences outline a two and a half by two and a half foot boundary line. The perimeter of the amount of land I own on the Hougan Manor in the Country of Cumbria, England. This land title give me the official title of Lady. A form of wish fulfillment, an unearned, meaningless accomplishment. A facade and deception. The cropping of life to a more ideal depiction.

The Peddler makes emotions tangible and manifest. Bursting bags of porcelain trinkets, a kiss is a thimble, but so is an acorn. Bags of wishes, hopes, courage, resilience, there is truth, fear and time in there as well. Participants trade the emotions they have in surplus to be weighed against emotions they desire. Only when the scale is in perfect balance will the peddler take ownership of the discarded emotions. Surplus anxiety, traded for a fist full of daydreams—no longer an ephemeral wisp, emotions can be held, weighted, felt rolling around at the bottom of your bag. Emotions, as ephemeral experiences, churn and build and though we've been taught to contain them they become swollen hot air balloons in need of tethering. We become lost in the assumption that they are truly unscalable. Held firmly in your hand, you regain authority.

Fascinated by the seduction of fairy tales, The Maiden’s Tragedy depicts the cyclical quest for a happily ever after. Perhaps the greatest service of the fairytale is its ability to console and reassure its audience with the tantalizing inevitability of the heroines contentment. Rather then a linear sequence of events that concludes with a happy continuum, happily ever after is perceived as fickle and momentary—as soon as it is reached, perception shifts, curiosity stirs and the quest begins again. Lives are spent questing. 

The Maiden exists in a wreath of porcelain vegetation, hovering above the grass, a barrier between worlds, a floating porcelain moat. She repeats a series of six gestures each representing a part of the literary definition of the heroines journey, The Maiden’s Tragedy — 

separation, seclusion, betrayal, wandering, atonement, and rescue.

Tarantism: a psychological illness characterized by an extreme impulse to dance, the impulse to dance to overcome melancholy.

This piece was conceived in parallel to becoming engaged in my own life. In becoming engaged I suddenly became aware of how the majority of the heroines I looked up to growing up ended their narratives with marriage or the promise of marriage. The end or more dramatically the death of their narrative was at the point of marriage. This was devastating to me, and alarming to realize that soon I would outlive, my life would surpass the life expectancy of my treasured role models and in doing so I would loose them as role models. It left me feeling strangely alone.

This notion of the narrative concluding in marriage becomes a funerary image, leaving the character as an eternal bride. She is pressed, like a flower within this solitary image. An idealized image. This final pressing is one of cultivated perfection.

In this performance I assume the image of the pressed flower, attempting to perform this archetypal image of female perfection. I dance for four continuous hours. As my body fatigued so did my elegance. Betrayed by sweat and exhaustion the image of a heroine romantically dancing with an imaginary partner, a common trope, is replaced by desperate obsession, the physiological impulse to dance. As with patients of tarantism - to dance was to overcome melancholy.

There is a history of relationships between heroines and songbirds, a courtship and an imagined friendship. They are often necessary to the heroines triumph, but the songbirds are simply an extension of self. They are an aspect of the heroine, they are her industriousness, determination, and fortitude.

In archetypal opposition society is nervous of the bird woman. She sits on the steps on the outskirts of acceptable society. When does this iconic relationship between heroine and songbird become persecuted? Is it then inevitable that beauty becomes crone?

Throughout the five hour Lumiere contemporary art festival, I sang to over one hundred porcelain birds that had been installed throughout the downtown of Sydney, Cape Breton. As the evening progressed I would obtain more and more birds on my person—sitting perched on my shoulders, my long gloves and atop my head. I soon had a crown of porcelain songbirds. As the festival commenced, I sang songs of hope and desire and soon I was like a pied piper leading people through the street, but as the birds began to accumulate and the evening darkened so did my songs. By the end of the evening I was simply repeating one forlorn song of slighted love. Rather than leading a parade, the audience began to part and let me pass in my focused recollection. The five hour durational performance allowed for an accelerated timeline, a hurried transformation from beauty to crone.

In Portrait of a Heroine identities are worn like found objects, like a readymade identity. I pilgrimage to the landscapes of heroines who deeply effected my childhood. These heroines, idolized and mimicked, persuaded the way I perceive the world, at times it often effected even how I moved and spoke in the world. Comparing these obsessions to worship, I raise their status to saint, walk in their footsteps and embody their landscape to get close to their stories and lessons.

While on site I leave a series of letters to the heroines asking for advice, sharing memories and proclaiming my adoration.

Using a self-portrait from a performance in which I had worn a porcelain crown, I commissioned a series of functional Canadian postage stamps. Traditionally a space reserved for monarchs and significant cultural figures, my postage stamp self-portraits, align my persona with the status of other historical figures. The postage stamp creates a platform of legacy. My identity becomes constructed from a combination of reality and fantasy which exaggerates and manipulates the public perception of my image.

When discussing the photograph as a souvenir, Susan Stewart describes a photograph as “an extension of a pressed flower.” The image of a pressed flower preserving a specific moment recalls the prescriptive Happily Ever After of fairy tale conclusions. The heroine is frozen in an illusion of eternal, youthful bliss. The heroine never exists beyond that perfect expression. She is a pressed flower captured in a precise triumphal moment.

The photograph is a theatrical object capable of the deception and fictionalization of appearances. In the case of the self-portrait used for my postage stamps, it is a disguise of self. I am pressing myself within an idealized fiction. I am the pressed flower.

A keeper of wishes.

She wishes and waits.

Holding the secrets and thoughts of others, warm and safe, tightly in her hand. She sends them off. Blown like kisses, with the ring of a bell.

An evocative object is more that an aesthetic surface or form, it is an object that through use fosters an emotional relationship with the possessor. In The Wishing Girl porcelain charms were used for their potential to become evocative objects. Participants selected a porcelain charm in which to whisper a wish into. Like a dear friend, the charm could keep a secret, even become the secret.

Wish in hand, the participants would close their eyes and think entirely of their wish. They would lock hands with The Wishing Girl and with the ring of a bell she would send wishes off to another world where wishes were treated more seriously. The bells had come from that world and had been brought here into or world by The Wishing Girl—this is what made the bells capable of casting wishes. Through involving my bells within a performance of their intended function, I am facilitating a moment of intimate, conscious use. A functional object is intended to perform.

What remains are the porcelain charms, now souvenirs of the wishing ceremony—a constant reminder and a potent symbol of personal narrative. The charm becomes autobiographical by embodying the wish, but it also embodies the memory itself.

In reaction to the perceived loss of genuine human encounters and the technological alienation in Western culture, there is a contemporary aesthetic of audience engagement, community exchange and interactivity. These practices are remedial as they are an effort to re-establish and maintain lost connections—a wistful attempt at momentary intimacy, however fleeting.

Between You and Me imagines the copious amount of frivolous technological communication that occurs daily— the screens full of one word responses and unfinished conversations. If these messages were to return to the written form would they change in tone, sophistication, length? Simply by making the message an object, a physical archive, a personified memory—does it transform the content? The tactility of a letter creates the presence of the writer, a sense of time and imagined space and journey that is undetectable in its technological counterparts.

Between You and Me was performed on four different occasions. Between a father and daughter, between lovers, between sisters and between friends. The couple would enter the space and for two hours sit across from one another without speaking. In silence they would write and respond to one another via an overhead pulley system. The piece was performed inside the UAS +15 Exhibition space, which provided a closed but observable environment. The audience transformed into voyeur as they watched and read the interaction of the couple, no longer were their words just Between You and Me.

Each year on the anniversary of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s wedding I send them a piece of handmade ceramics that I have created. This began as an exploration of my persona as maker. i imagined that my work was being smuggled back from a daydream and therefore proof of that alternative worlds existence. I began to amplify my role and persona in that world and imagine that having created that world I was likely the matriarch and monarch as well. And so the gesture of celebrating the Duke and Duchess’ wedding was an attempt at aligning my imagined, amplified identity with people in this world. It was an attempt to legitimize the status of this persona.

I include in this current body of work as it were my first instincts towards performance and the role of fantasy in the creation of identity.