Working through feelings: I am terrified of losing my strength. Exercise: Body weight tricep dips with a hip extension. A performance project I started late 2021, marrying fitness with performance.
Working Through Feelings: An overwhelming sense of anxiety that I won’t get everything done. Exercise: bucket drops
Working Through Feelings: The anger I feel at myself when I waste head space being intimidated by others achievements. Exercise: sledgehammer blows. Turn your sound on to experience satisfying sledgehammer clunking noise.
More Working Through Feelings this evening in my baltic garage: working through the mild disgust I experienced with myself for the time I spent on social media today. It occurred to me I’m actually ageing as I scroll. Art/training/fitness/staying sane/family/social media/being at home have all become so enmeshed, and the days have all piled into such a blur.
Exercise: landmine front squats
Working Through Feelings: Head wrecked from trying to fit a proposal submission into 250 words. Exercise: Bear crawls. Bear crawls help grow neural pathways across the left and right side of the brain. Maybe that will help with the proposal. 

Was working through some feelings with my training, as per usual, and thought I’d frame it in an objective way, focusing on the feeling as opposed to the action.

Seeing these as a precursor to a durational performance with an interactive layer- introduce a way to let people communicate their own feelings that could be worked through. Like what I did at Revision last year. If performance was online could this be done through instagram?

In any case it feels right for now. Relevant and in line with our collective anxieties.

This ongoing work reflects the uncertainty and fragility of the times.

The work serves as a coping mechanism, a way to change your state of mind in the short term, with endorphins and fatigue.

My career history includes 14 years of working as a physical fitness instructor. During this time I used and taught strength training daily. Lifting weights continues to be an important part of my routine, to stay physically strong, and to help manage anxiety and worry. My performative practice uses the body as a tool to continue to express and instruct.

Levels of collective anxiety have risen exponentially with pandemic related social distancing, unemployment, isolation, sickness. My work seeks to tackle this anxiety through action. When your head is full to bursting with worry, take action and move. Movement dispels stress and increases endorphin based joy.

This work simply seeks to show one individuals coping mechanisms, and all the humour and desperation and ridiculousness that this entails.  

Writing all of this as I have nearly finished writing yet another proposal- this time for TULCA. I feel my chances of selection are 150:1, but I will nonetheless throw my hat into the ring. I feel this as the work I have viewed before in TULCA and the curatorial reasonings I’ve read around it are imbued with a certain discourse that I have yet to connect with. It’s always very cerebral work, insider art so to speak. You would need a good understanding of contemporary art to understand it. Or it appears so when viewed through my screen, this might be different in real life. I also think its fait to say that I’ve been approaching it and shows like it with a heavily coloured set of assumptions. Anyway I don’t think I’ve enough shows etc behind me to be considered, and making that change from emerging to even semi-established is as big and challenging a transition as any I can think of.

Thought about submitting any of these 4:

WTF, developing a durational interactive performance, as described above

INTBR, (which I have been planning so far as the one to submit), with 10 more tasks, planning a comprehensive 25 task durational performance.

Keep Smiling, developing a more realised performance around this idea of the smiley masked persona carrying out unpleasant tasks.

The best medicine. Performing the laughing buddha durational work.

Thinking it might be a good idea to ask someone to review my proposal before I send it. Moran? Áine? The thing about it is, soul wrenching though they are to do, the work involved in putting these proposals together always yields something back. It will have sparked new ideas and ways to disseminate the work. Factoring in the slightness of the possibility of the work being chosen, even though I am very sure of the validity of my work, and would not consider entering it otherwise. So it’s worth it anyway as if it’s meant to be made I will find a way. I always do.