Marina Abramovich

I started researching performance art, as all my ideas keep ending up to be performance, and I came across an artist called Marina Abramovich. This woman is absolutely insane, but brilliant. The more I researched the more I felt connected with her, strangely enough. Marina does a lot of shocking pieces (one in which she cuts a pentagram onto her stomach and lies in a pentagram of fire, after cutting all her hair and nails off and throwing them into the fire, until she passes out from lack of oxygen and the audience have to take her out!) but when asked questions like "Doesn't it hurt?" or "Do you feel pain?" she she answers, "It's not about the pain, its what it stands for.". In my work as an aerialist, I perform at life-threatening heights and push through extreme pain, for what the piece stands for. I'm starting to feel that aerial is not just performance anymore it really is art! The message we give across the story we tell, its very similar. Here is a piece I performed recently. We were rigged of a crane at 50 metres height! I feel like this piece is relevant to my work right now as once we came on the surrounding space became completely still despite all the surrounding distractions and the fierce wind and rain. For those few minutes, we held every single persons attention!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/caw0tx75xl0kg6i/2012-09-29%2020.18.32.mov