Georgia Legg

The work presented here, titled Trace is concerned with ways in which performance art can be viewed after the fact. While concerned with the nature and experience of performance, the audience isn’t invited to view the live action only what I have left behind to indicate the happening occurred. This has allowed me to explore the embodied and material relationships activated by each performance. The final physical outcomes are akin to drawings viewed alongside a booklet informing through event scores, images, writing and individual detailed information about each performance what has happened before.  

The dimensions of each performance were determined, according to the proportions of my body. My height, reach, and wingspan all dictated the final measurements, making each physical outcome personal and related to the absent body. When considering the existence of space, it is very difficult to exclude our body, we often capture and remember different environments by our feelings and emotions felt there. By creating the performances in my studio, a mostly private and introspective environment, I was permitted to focus on and hold thoughts and feelings that may otherwise go unnoticed. Performing these actions alone I was able to observe my relationship with time, space and objects, thoughts, and feelings that I recorded by writing for concentrated periods after each performance.  

The physical outcomes (or drawings) are a selection of marks produced through performance. The method of mark making is appropriate to the particular actions taken by the body in the space and how the body meets the materials. Through only showing the remanence of the action suspends the experience and compels us to focus on its sensory aspects.  

My work shows the physical remains of controlled lived experiences, this is underpinned by phenomenology, the philosophical thinking of experience. For phenomenology, the ultimate source of meaning and value of life is in our unique lived experiences as human beings. For example, the appearance of things in our experience and the individual way we experience objects, tasks, and spaces, the works shown here aim to make visible this personal lived experience. The work endeavours to invite the audience to embody the experience through my personal reflections shown.