BLOCKHEAD
EVE TRAVIS
03 – 12 FEBRUARY, 2023
The first of 2022/23's Graduate Residency Solo Exhibitions sees EVE TRAVIS present BLOCKHEAD
A multi media exhibition, comprising performance, wearable art, sculpture, photography and video work, Blockhead, the debut solo show of artist and performer Eve Travis, seeks to explore the dichotomy of disempowerment and empowerment for women onstage. Through the lens of the sideshow, Blockhead also raises notions of objectification and fetishization, and the relationship of women’s bodies to pain and endurance, in life and as spectacle.
The Human Blockhead is a carnival or sideshow performer who hammers a nail or other implement into his or her nasal cavity via the nostrils, a stunt which is often performed alongside a bed of nails act, in which the performer lies a top a rectangular piece of wood with numerous nails sticking up out of it. Performances which appear both dangerous and immensely painful as well as inhuman with the aim of shocking audiences.
Historically, the sideshow has provided “a designated and unique space which offered access to the ‘other’” (Problem Bodies and Sideshow Space, Pugh, 2020) and whilst operating outside of society, has been a site for both societal reflection and continued negotiation regarding the politicised sphere of the body, creating a space in which to confront, and exaggerate. According to Durbach, sideshow performers were in “collaboration with the audience whose spectatorship itself shaped the construct of the performer’s body as aberrant” (Spectacle of Deformity, Durbach, 2009).
By focusing on, and exaggerating the reactive moment where the object meets body and exploring the body as material, Eve attempts to subvert the potential for objectification. Through recreating, repurposing and misusing props, costume and make-up from her career as a sideshow performer, she aims to dissect the sideshow in relation to gender expectations and performativity. Her discarded make-up wipes – traces from stage and playing with personas in the studio, are transformed into multiple masks which act as a presence in the space. Masks are defined as a “covering for all or part of the face, worn as a disguise, or to amuse or frighten others”, in this case the masks displace the performer portraying stripped back personas to offer an intimate insight into the guises used on stage. Her sculpture ‘Bed of Nails’ features as object and in photographs, made from acrylic, its transparency allows for flesh to be photographed through the bed capturing the moment the body connects with, and is sculpted and distorted by, the nails conveying the discomfort and pain the performer must endure. Finally, a video work in which the artist uses her body and her sideshow skills to create abstract imagery, accompanied by audio in which female, trans and nonbinary performers can be heard discussing their relationship to their body and how that is impacted by their performance practice, their experiences on stage, and their audience, explores ideas of performativity, self-image, and societal pressures for performers onstage.
Blockhead intends to capture the viewer as the sideshow captures its audience, offering insight into performers experiences by exhibiting performance traces and props whilst sharing performers’ stories, to explore gender performativity and gender expectations both on and offstage.
Eve Travis is a multidisciplinary artist currently working with performance, traces, wearable art, sculpture, and installation. Having recently graduated with first class honours in Fine Art from Staffordshire University, she is currently completing an artist residency at AirSpace Gallery, whilst working as a circus and sideshow performer, she aims to dissect the intersection between theatrical performance, live art and the performances of our everyday lives whilst investigating what and where constitutes as a stage or performance space. Coming from a performance background informs her contemplation of performativity, masking, and identity. Her personal experiences of performing on and off stage, both intentionally and otherwise, fuel and influence her line of enquiry.
Through the use of her body, and by deconstructing stage props, she dissects her career as a sideshow performer and explores the duality of disempowerment and empowerment for women on stage. Using the props and their deconstructed parts to distort, disfigure and sculpt her body, she subverts the potential for objectification and investigates the relationship of pain and endurance to women’s bodies both in life and as spectacle.
@evedearbhailart
REVIEW by ANNEKA FRENCH
Eve Travis has developed an artistic practice informed by her background and current work in cabaret, carnival and circus sideshow contexts. Her solo exhibition Blockhead incorporates sculptural, video, photography, painting and performance elements, using these as tools to investigate broad ideas of the body in relation to specific types of performance shows.
Take, for instance, Blockhead (all works 2023), a sculpture in which six-inch nails have been driven directly into a vintage milliner’s block. Travis’ hammer and nails have transformed the dummy into a violent and unsettling thing. Nails are the key material in several of the exhibition’s works including three large-scale photographs and the sculpture, Bed of Nails, in which she has drilled and hammered 836 six-inch nails into a transparent acrylic base to form the titular bed. The work utilises a labour-intensive making process that echoes the labour of performing on such an object and the bodily precision and endurance required to do so safely and well. The sculpture is activated by a pulsing spotlight that glints upon the nails. Sideshow/Showgirl, meanwhile, is a performance piece realised on the opening night of the exhibition in which Travis moved through a series of acts including lying on another bed of nails and hammering a nail into her nostril, walking a fine line between safety and the dramatic impression of pain created through skill, dedication and training. Travis transitioned from these impressive feats to something arguably more vulnerable, in that she slowly removed her costume, wig and make-up in front of the live assembled audience, deconstructing the performance itself. The debris of Sideshow/Showgirl litters the gallery window space, raising questions of spectacle, the autonomy of the artist and the complicity of the audience within a performance context. An elderly gentleman peeks through the window at the discarded items when I visit the exhibition a few days after opening, his reaction a combination of puzzlement and curiosity.
Set back from the window three-dimensional works including Masque occupy the gallery. Masque is a series of six suspended heads made up of handmade masks stuffed with wadding. The masks are comprised of stitched make-up wipes, complete with traces of brightly coloured stage make-up. Travis’ use of wipes as a medium connects the work to that of Turner Prize-nominated artist Sin Wai Kin, who likewise explores the construction of identity via costume and make-up, in their case specifically looking at cultures surrounding Hollywood, drag and Peking and Cantonese Opera. Travis’ Masque also features masks made from a re-fashioned pale peach synthetic satin robe. Retaining small details of pockets, sleeves and the robe’s belt within the construction of the masks puts me in mind of costumes imagined by artist filmmaker Marianna Simnett, particularly those within Simnett’s recent video installation The Severed Tail (2022), in which questions of sexuality, fetish and the animal are emphasised. In Travis’ work, the remaining details of the robes form tails, ears and other intimate bodily orifices, motifs which are picked up in works elsewhere in the exhibition.
I am not a performer but I can relate to many of Travis’ research themes. In the exhibition text she writes about the “objectification and fetishisation [of] women’s bodies [in] relationship to pain and endurance, in life and as spectacle”. Travis is mindful of and sensitive to the experiences of others. Opening out discussions to additional performers, Travis interviews a selection of trans, non-binary and performers of colour in the audio element of Backstage (Act 1). One person notes that “performer me is edited, shiny and has a filter”; another notes they that feel they are “selling myself as a product”. Such comments bring some of the most uncomfortable aspects of performance to the fore: commodification and objectification, touching also upon mental health concerns and experiences of trauma. Travis notes that these frank discussions with friends and colleagues have left her better equipped to support them both personally and professionally. The impact of care emerges here. Meanwhile, the video element of Backstage (Act 1) takes viewers on a journey into Travis’ nasal cavity, paralleling the passage of the nail in the blockhead sideshow act albeit in a more abstracted and less shocking manner.
Performance is ingrained. Travis’ parents were performers, travelling internationally for shows, with Travis travelling alongside them and being largely home schooled. She describes her parents as inspirational but notes that as a child she “just wanted to be normal” and opted initially for undergraduate studies in law and philosophy. Following a re-think and a number of years working in performance herself, Travis recently completed a BA in Fine Art at Staffordshire University and lives locally in Stoke-on-Trent, where she continues to work as a professional performer. Her exhibition marks the end of a 6-month graduate residency period, a developmental opportunity which has enabled her to be part of the AirSpace Gallery community and make use of facilities, expertise and mentoring. Travis notes that she hopes to continue to make time to perform and for her art practice and is keen to stress the positive influence of the scheme in allowing her time and space as well as opportunity for dialogue and critical reflection. I ask her about the separation between art and performance and she describes her position as at the beginning of thinking through intersections between performance and her art practice, noting “a healthy overlap”, something she aims to explore further at MA level, making work for and within different types of spaces.
Travis’ exhibition is a mixture of celebrating, subverting and critiquing performance culture and her own place within it. Verbs take prescience when describing Travis’ practice – occupy, deconstruct, disrupt, activate, endure, react – all terms which are equally significant within her work. While references to Covid-19 testing and transmission precaution measures are visible, if incidental, within the exhibition through the inclusion of masks and nasal insertions, it is this question of the role, purpose and impacts of performance that are at the heart of Blockhead, and a rich field of future enquiry for Travis’s practice.
Anneka French is an independent curator and critic. She contributes to Art Quarterly, Burlington Contemporary and Photomonitor, and has had writing and editorial commissions for the Turner Prize, Fire Station Artists’ Studios, TACO!, Photoworks+ and Grain Projects. She worked as Co-ordinator and then Director at New Art West Midlands, as Editorial Manager of contemporary art magazine this is tomorrow and has worked at Tate Modern, Ikon, The New Art Gallery Walsall and Wolverhampton Art Gallery. French has curated exhibitions at Grand Union, Birmingham; KH7 ArtSpace, Aarhus, Denmark and Coventry Biennial. Her publication Gently Bumping was published in 2022.
Each year, AirSpace Gallery’s Graduate Residency Programme offers two new graduates a fantastic opportunity to be part of an exciting and innovative artist-led space in Stoke-on-Trent, providing 6 months free studio space, ongoing professional development support, mentoring and guidance in those crucial first months out of higher education, and an end-of-residency solo exhibition. Now into its 8th instalment, the residency programme is an attempt to tackle and highlight a problem with graduate retention in the city, offering early stage professional development support to artists.
A multi media exhibition, comprising performance, wearable art, sculpture, photography and video work, Blockhead, the debut solo show of artist and performer Eve Travis, seeks to explore the dichotomy of disempowerment and empowerment for women onstage. Through the lens of the sideshow, Blockhead also raises notions of objectification and fetishization, and the relationship of women’s bodies to pain and endurance, in life and as spectacle.
The Human Blockhead is a carnival or sideshow performer who hammers a nail or other implement into his or her nasal cavity via the nostrils, a stunt which is often performed alongside a bed of nails act, in which the performer lies a top a rectangular piece of wood with numerous nails sticking up out of it. Performances which appear both dangerous and immensely painful as well as inhuman with the aim of shocking audiences.
Historically, the sideshow has provided “a designated and unique space which offered access to the ‘other’” (Problem Bodies and Sideshow Space, Pugh, 2020) and whilst operating outside of society, has been a site for both societal reflection and continued negotiation regarding the politicised sphere of the body, creating a space in which to confront, and exaggerate. According to Durbach, sideshow performers were in “collaboration with the audience whose spectatorship itself shaped the construct of the performer’s body as aberrant” (Spectacle of Deformity, Durbach, 2009).
By focusing on, and exaggerating the reactive moment where the object meets body and exploring the body as material, Eve attempts to subvert the potential for objectification. Through recreating, repurposing and misusing props, costume and make-up from her career as a sideshow performer, she aims to dissect the sideshow in relation to gender expectations and performativity. Her discarded make-up wipes – traces from stage and playing with personas in the studio, are transformed into multiple masks which act as a presence in the space. Masks are defined as a “covering for all or part of the face, worn as a disguise, or to amuse or frighten others”, in this case the masks displace the performer portraying stripped back personas to offer an intimate insight into the guises used on stage. Her sculpture ‘Bed of Nails’ features as object and in photographs, made from acrylic, its transparency allows for flesh to be photographed through the bed capturing the moment the body connects with, and is sculpted and distorted by, the nails conveying the discomfort and pain the performer must endure. Finally, a video work in which the artist uses her body and her sideshow skills to create abstract imagery, accompanied by audio in which female, trans and nonbinary performers can be heard discussing their relationship to their body and how that is impacted by their performance practice, their experiences on stage, and their audience, explores ideas of performativity, self-image, and societal pressures for performers onstage.
Blockhead intends to capture the viewer as the sideshow captures its audience, offering insight into performers experiences by exhibiting performance traces and props whilst sharing performers’ stories, to explore gender performativity and gender expectations both on and offstage.
Eve Travis is a multidisciplinary artist currently working with performance, traces, wearable art, sculpture, and installation. Having recently graduated with first class honours in Fine Art from Staffordshire University, she is currently completing an artist residency at AirSpace Gallery, whilst working as a circus and sideshow performer, she aims to dissect the intersection between theatrical performance, live art and the performances of our everyday lives whilst investigating what and where constitutes as a stage or performance space. Coming from a performance background informs her contemplation of performativity, masking, and identity. Her personal experiences of performing on and off stage, both intentionally and otherwise, fuel and influence her line of enquiry.
Through the use of her body, and by deconstructing stage props, she dissects her career as a sideshow performer and explores the duality of disempowerment and empowerment for women on stage. Using the props and their deconstructed parts to distort, disfigure and sculpt her body, she subverts the potential for objectification and investigates the relationship of pain and endurance to women’s bodies both in life and as spectacle.
@evedearbhailart
REVIEW by ANNEKA FRENCH
Eve Travis has developed an artistic practice informed by her background and current work in cabaret, carnival and circus sideshow contexts. Her solo exhibition Blockhead incorporates sculptural, video, photography, painting and performance elements, using these as tools to investigate broad ideas of the body in relation to specific types of performance shows.
Take, for instance, Blockhead (all works 2023), a sculpture in which six-inch nails have been driven directly into a vintage milliner’s block. Travis’ hammer and nails have transformed the dummy into a violent and unsettling thing. Nails are the key material in several of the exhibition’s works including three large-scale photographs and the sculpture, Bed of Nails, in which she has drilled and hammered 836 six-inch nails into a transparent acrylic base to form the titular bed. The work utilises a labour-intensive making process that echoes the labour of performing on such an object and the bodily precision and endurance required to do so safely and well. The sculpture is activated by a pulsing spotlight that glints upon the nails. Sideshow/Showgirl, meanwhile, is a performance piece realised on the opening night of the exhibition in which Travis moved through a series of acts including lying on another bed of nails and hammering a nail into her nostril, walking a fine line between safety and the dramatic impression of pain created through skill, dedication and training. Travis transitioned from these impressive feats to something arguably more vulnerable, in that she slowly removed her costume, wig and make-up in front of the live assembled audience, deconstructing the performance itself. The debris of Sideshow/Showgirl litters the gallery window space, raising questions of spectacle, the autonomy of the artist and the complicity of the audience within a performance context. An elderly gentleman peeks through the window at the discarded items when I visit the exhibition a few days after opening, his reaction a combination of puzzlement and curiosity.
Set back from the window three-dimensional works including Masque occupy the gallery. Masque is a series of six suspended heads made up of handmade masks stuffed with wadding. The masks are comprised of stitched make-up wipes, complete with traces of brightly coloured stage make-up. Travis’ use of wipes as a medium connects the work to that of Turner Prize-nominated artist Sin Wai Kin, who likewise explores the construction of identity via costume and make-up, in their case specifically looking at cultures surrounding Hollywood, drag and Peking and Cantonese Opera. Travis’ Masque also features masks made from a re-fashioned pale peach synthetic satin robe. Retaining small details of pockets, sleeves and the robe’s belt within the construction of the masks puts me in mind of costumes imagined by artist filmmaker Marianna Simnett, particularly those within Simnett’s recent video installation The Severed Tail (2022), in which questions of sexuality, fetish and the animal are emphasised. In Travis’ work, the remaining details of the robes form tails, ears and other intimate bodily orifices, motifs which are picked up in works elsewhere in the exhibition.
I am not a performer but I can relate to many of Travis’ research themes. In the exhibition text she writes about the “objectification and fetishisation [of] women’s bodies [in] relationship to pain and endurance, in life and as spectacle”. Travis is mindful of and sensitive to the experiences of others. Opening out discussions to additional performers, Travis interviews a selection of trans, non-binary and performers of colour in the audio element of Backstage (Act 1). One person notes that “performer me is edited, shiny and has a filter”; another notes they that feel they are “selling myself as a product”. Such comments bring some of the most uncomfortable aspects of performance to the fore: commodification and objectification, touching also upon mental health concerns and experiences of trauma. Travis notes that these frank discussions with friends and colleagues have left her better equipped to support them both personally and professionally. The impact of care emerges here. Meanwhile, the video element of Backstage (Act 1) takes viewers on a journey into Travis’ nasal cavity, paralleling the passage of the nail in the blockhead sideshow act albeit in a more abstracted and less shocking manner.
Performance is ingrained. Travis’ parents were performers, travelling internationally for shows, with Travis travelling alongside them and being largely home schooled. She describes her parents as inspirational but notes that as a child she “just wanted to be normal” and opted initially for undergraduate studies in law and philosophy. Following a re-think and a number of years working in performance herself, Travis recently completed a BA in Fine Art at Staffordshire University and lives locally in Stoke-on-Trent, where she continues to work as a professional performer. Her exhibition marks the end of a 6-month graduate residency period, a developmental opportunity which has enabled her to be part of the AirSpace Gallery community and make use of facilities, expertise and mentoring. Travis notes that she hopes to continue to make time to perform and for her art practice and is keen to stress the positive influence of the scheme in allowing her time and space as well as opportunity for dialogue and critical reflection. I ask her about the separation between art and performance and she describes her position as at the beginning of thinking through intersections between performance and her art practice, noting “a healthy overlap”, something she aims to explore further at MA level, making work for and within different types of spaces.
Travis’ exhibition is a mixture of celebrating, subverting and critiquing performance culture and her own place within it. Verbs take prescience when describing Travis’ practice – occupy, deconstruct, disrupt, activate, endure, react – all terms which are equally significant within her work. While references to Covid-19 testing and transmission precaution measures are visible, if incidental, within the exhibition through the inclusion of masks and nasal insertions, it is this question of the role, purpose and impacts of performance that are at the heart of Blockhead, and a rich field of future enquiry for Travis’s practice.
Anneka French is an independent curator and critic. She contributes to Art Quarterly, Burlington Contemporary and Photomonitor, and has had writing and editorial commissions for the Turner Prize, Fire Station Artists’ Studios, TACO!, Photoworks+ and Grain Projects. She worked as Co-ordinator and then Director at New Art West Midlands, as Editorial Manager of contemporary art magazine this is tomorrow and has worked at Tate Modern, Ikon, The New Art Gallery Walsall and Wolverhampton Art Gallery. French has curated exhibitions at Grand Union, Birmingham; KH7 ArtSpace, Aarhus, Denmark and Coventry Biennial. Her publication Gently Bumping was published in 2022.
Each year, AirSpace Gallery’s Graduate Residency Programme offers two new graduates a fantastic opportunity to be part of an exciting and innovative artist-led space in Stoke-on-Trent, providing 6 months free studio space, ongoing professional development support, mentoring and guidance in those crucial first months out of higher education, and an end-of-residency solo exhibition. Now into its 8th instalment, the residency programme is an attempt to tackle and highlight a problem with graduate retention in the city, offering early stage professional development support to artists.
