Getting towards the end of this residency and my body feels close to a burn out. Working while your six month old wakes you up every hour during the night like a sleep torture program has been.. hard. My insides are starting to jolt and shudder.

I have been considering the way we describe the shell of an automobile as a ‘body’, an external casing which holds in all of the car or lorry’s guts. There are auto body repair shops for when you damage your body or car and truck body builders for when you want an upgrade.

Researching this also led me to a strange trend of body builders (the weight lifting type) posing with their cars and this amazingly comical article to help body builders choose the best car for them which says ..

‘As bodybuilders, you cannot survive without a car. A good and big car will not only look proportional to you but will also serve your needs adequately.’

And of course there is the ‘sports car’.

These automobile bodies can be symbols of wealth, power, authority, capitalism, work, burn out or protest. During times of social unrest and resistance, the news and media is often littered with images and videos of burning cars (ACAB). When our physical bodies become exhausted by the pressures of capitalism and the inequalities of structural oppression, we also burn out and break down.

I like to think of myself as a monster truck; big, slow, colourful and garish, with very little functional use other than for fun.. a performative body that rests a lot and comes out bouncing and blazing for a show every so often when I feel like it, only to inevitably and predictably crash and burn at the end.

I’ve been researching bodybuilder poses, the reasons for them and the way they accentuate the muscle definition. Scrolling through Google images at these magazine covers, there are obvious themes that arise. The women are very rarely as muscly as the men, they are often used as props to the central male figure or they are overtly feminised and sexualised in bikinis with big flowing hair. I couldn’t find any magazine covers with any variation of this apart from Renee Campbell, a bodybuilder who is trying to challenge the standard look. There weren’t any covers of her but the photos from an article on CNN definitely had a different energy and aesthetic.

The positions range from intimidating to comical, one of my favourites is the one where they look like they’re pushing an invisible shopping trolley. When I look at a lot of these images and bodies all at once, shiny, bulging, smiling, angry, tanned, flexed bodies, it starts to make me feel weird, they remind me of rotisserie chickens just spinning on repeat. But they are also somehow very fascinating and impressive.

The limitations of mobility that pushing your body to this size causes makes me wonder if they are really hyperable or if they are just a visual symbol of hyperability.

I have been working with fashion designer, Max Allen, to literally build a body. You can see the final product in my studio. I am going to use this costume for a choreographic film experiment, superimposing this performative figure onto my own physical body. Here is some of our inspo:

Growing up, my Mum, like my previously mentioned biological Dad, was also into body building and fitness in general.

For as long as I can remember she has kept mood boards of desirable body types and ideas of what is ‘healthy’ that she aspires to, around the house. These are the current ones which have been sat in her kitchen for the past couple of years which are very age focused. They used to only feature body builders when I was younger but more recently yogis, swimmers and runners have joined her fitness inspo crew as her own interests have diversified.

When I mentioned the body boards in passing to a disabled friend of mine a couple of years ago, they asked me what it was like to be around these images when you’re not physically able to ever attain one of these bodies. I was so used to them being around, posing next to the fridge, gleaming on the wall of whichever corner of the house she’d displayed her weights, that I had never really thought about it. I still don’t really know what I think about it now. I mean, I don’t tend to judge how other people want to decorate their houses or what they do to make themselves feel good.

I may not be able to attain one of these bodies but my body is pushed to it’s limits in a different way. It’s not by choice and the experience may not appear how you might expect it to. I’m no athlete, training to impress you with a record breaking, gold medal, fastest time, personal best PERFORMANCE. I don’t want to be anyone’s inspiration for managing to get through the day either. 

I might start making mood boards of people just lying down, looking really comfortable watching telly and put them up around my house. It’s one of the only physical states I desire. (Which by the way, are very hard images to find because everyone looks stiff and staged). The other physical states I desire are only attainable through different forms of visualisation; alien, jelly creature, plant, cyborg, insect, sea creature, goat, mascot and floating air molecule. This is what I use to escape the pain of my physical form. I keep digital collections of images of these bodies, which I guess is a similar practice to my Mum’s boards. 

We all do what we’ve gotta do.

I found this tshirt for two quid from a shop round the corner from my house. I’m not really into patriotism but I’m feelin pretty underwhelmed by the games I’ve seen so far and I want to try and get into the spirit while watching at home. Let’s hope tonight’s game is a little more exciting!

The page from [reading] [sounds] I posted earlier last week produced a question that has been pondering on my mind- what word could be used to represent silence in the subtitle?

I wanted to share the responses I have collected from people during my work in progress show during my MA year 2017. I had a sketchbook laid out in front of the audience asking the question “WHAT IS SILENCE?”

The answers I received were all different and made me realise that silence can be represented in a poetic and abstract way.

Below is the digital collation of selected answers from the sketchbook.

This chapter of the book starts with the sentence “As counterintuitive as it may sound, silence sometimes needs to be closed captioned.” I couldn’t agree more with this line because it is so easy for captioners to oversee the importance of including silence/ambient sound and the difference this makes for viewers to understand the story better. There have been several occasions where I could hear something happening on TV (ambient sound in films that adds to the atmosphere/scene) but no word appears in the subtitle section to give me an answer to my curiosity.

Can silence be captioned? How can one interpret silence into words?

“A large proportion of the U.K. television audience relies on subtitles. The BBC’s audience research team has run two audience surveys for us over the past two years. Each used a representative sample of around 5000 participants, who were questioned on that day’s viewing. The responses indicate that about 10% of the audience use subtitles on any one day and around 6% use them for most of their viewing. This equates to an audience of around 4.5 million people in the U.K., of which over 2.5 million use them most or all of the time. Importantly, not all subtitle users have hearing difficulties, some are watching with the sound turned off and others use them to support their comprehension of the program, while around a quarter of people with hearing difficulties watch television without subtitles.” (from the article published in 2017 titled Understanding the diverse needs of subtitle users in a rapidly evolving media landscape)

It is important to note that not everyone that uses subtitles identifies as d/Deaf or hard of hearing. In my recent research, I found an article written in 2006 discussing subtitles used by 6 million people with so-called “perfect” hearing. In the comments section, some individuals have shared why they enjoy using subtitles, their answers included that of providing a distraction for kids, learning English, or being able to multi-task etc. The link to the article is here.

Can subtitle capture emotions on screen? How does reading subtitle enhance the experience of film watching? When you read the subtitle, what kind of tone do you read in?

Tweety Bird, whose gender was intentionally ambiguous in the original Looney Tunes cartoons, is one of the first and only examples of a non-binary character in mainstream media that I really relate to. I even have them tattooed on my arm with the word ‘LADETTE’ (see below).

I love how Tweety’s persona has continued to develop outside of the cartoon narrative in memes, one of my favourite being the one above, although I can’t find the original creator to credit them. Does anyone know? 

In the cartoon, Tweety survives constant harassment and attacks from Sylvester the cat, all while being a physically small and sometimes unassuming creature, although a crafty and clever side is suggested. Proof that it takes more than hyperable physiques to survive the energy vampires of this world. Looney Tunes played with the ambiguity and fluidity of gender with many of their characters and it was never targeted at a specific gender audience which I think is unusual for a lot of children’s mainstream entertainment.

I made a little Tweety meme myself below using some of the vast collection of images I have of unofficial Tweety costumes.

This text was suggested to me by Linda Stupart, who is also currently doing a residency with Vital Capacities at the moment. It’s written by Joseph Noonan-Ganley and it is titled, ‘Our Prop Mud’ and you can read it in full here. It’s about rugby and mud and gay feelings. I could really relate to these contemplations on sports and queerness and the consumption of bodies and their public personas. 

Here is an excerpt that I really like,

‘The scene that stopped me was the Cardiff Park Arms rugby match from 1970, transformed by the unrelenting appearance of mud. Ironically, mud allowed me to see clearer. The scene clarified and exposed some of what I was interested in in Gareth Thomas. Mud’s addition messed up rugby’s conventional surface and allowed a view onto the base material composition of the game: people’s bodies in relation. These kinds of political derivatives seem far more generative and uncertain than Gareth Thomas’s recycled admissions of guilt and fault.’