Facepainting at Frieze

Performing the experiment and analyzing the created object

Its been a long time coming, after my great speech about this being a space for this, that and the other. I have been in Paris all summer on a two month residency, and somehow managed not to write a single word about it? In true dyslexic style I will show you what I have been up to recently first, and what I did ages ago later. Confused? Good.
These are some pics from a RCA outreach workshop I did with the very wonderful artist Lucy Pawlak, I will let the pics speak for themselves, needless to say it was a gas!

Dear painter, paint for me - Face painting workshop @ RCA

This is going to be last entry today, I reckon three in one day is more than enough to make up for my slack effort till now.
On Saturday June the 1st I was led a face-painting workshop in a large mirrored cube at the Royal College of Art for OutReach RCA and as part of the Summer 2008 MA show. As my trusty sidekick I had Boo Saville, Ellie Tobin, Ryan and Ritta (Both RCA students) and the help of the excellent photographer Michele Panzeri. The fancy dress shop where I used to work (The Carnival Store) had kindly loaned me a bunch of wigs, which added to my arsenal of false noses, masks and face-paints.
The idea was simply to transform people into walking works of Art and send them off into the gallery to confuse and bewilder people. It was a little scary, not least cos I was in an enormous mirrored cube outside the RCA but also 'cos it was essentially a face painting workshop and I had this horrid fear we would spend all day painting Spiderman and Hulk faces on children. How wrong I turned out to be. It turned out to be really successful, we accosted this great kid who took it upon himself to drag people off the street and out of the gallery into our den of identity makeover. Kid, I don't remember your name, but if you're reading this, you were a legend. I reckon of the whole day, Boo looked best as the Elvis man with an orange chin.... winner.
What was really great about the day apart from all the obvious stuff, was the realization that it was a really great way to involve people in my practice. It opened it up to a new dialogue with the public where they felt actively involved in the creation of something. Ok, it was just face painting to a point, but I reckon there is scope for this to happen in a gallery environment so that the traditional divide between 'art' and 'reality' is blurred somewhat. I think part of the reason it worked so well is that we stuck to our guns with what we wanted to paint on people, so there was a really good shock factor on their behalf when they finally looked in a mirror at the end. All in all, a rather good days work.