Laura Dee Milnes — SHE PERFORMS

With Laura’s focus on performance, she hasn’t had a studio (separate from her living space) for a long time. For her MA in Sculpture though, she had a studio at school and has grown to like the idea of having a studio and separating life from work a bit more. It also gives her a chance to look after her materials more. Because if you read performance and think, yes, why would she even need a studio, you HAVE to read on! The education in sculpture has influenced Laura in her work, though not in a traditional sense. She tells me that her performances often start out with a sculptor’s idea: to build something. On a clothes rack, she puts together the outfit, the accessories and props that will make this character who they are supposed to be.

Based on the same ideology that we don’t want to call someone a female artist (but just artist), Laura doesn’t call herself a performance artist. Partly that is because she IS an artist before anything else, but also because she doesn’t want to limit her practice to one category. And that seems more than important, after we’ve only managed to touch the tip of the iceberg of her oeuvre during this visit. She works cross media with questions of the performative and communication at its centre. Writing is a big part of her performance, and I could have spent days in her studio just reading all the witty books and zines that she had produced as part of her practice, but I’ll come back to that in a minute. Laura has initiated a new writing club just recently aimed at providing an occasion for everyone non-male who is interested in participating. She’s not the leader of it and that is very important to distinguish. In this occasion, as well as in a lot of her works, the idea of community and sharing is at its core.

LDM Escaping Myself, Becoming All Else- Several attempts to live outside the skin I am in.jpg

Back to her writing. It’s not flat and it’s not ‘just’ writing. Laura tells me that she thinks of the way she constructs her writing as sculptural. It’s about the visual, the material and it comes from bodily sensations and experiences. Emotion is physical - gut feeling, heart break. For her dissertation, Laura investigated how we can escape the limits of our own bodies and published the chapters about it in a bound book that is wrapped in a very tactile, soft, milky plastic fabric and held in place by a pink, velvet band, knotted into a bow. Needless to say I instantly was in love with the work. I hadn’t read a word, but the haptic and visual nature affected me in the same way that looking at a sculpture or painting might.

Only I also was allowed to touch it. Unpack it. Experience it. Laura’s writings are material and in that way they are sculptural. During her MA, she found that many working as sculptors were very concerned about the form of things. For her, sculptures are and have always been about sensation and experience. And thus, her practice works so strongly across media and disciplines while maintaining her voice throughout.

Her background in theatre also influences the way she works. There are props, costumes and sets. Her fascination with sets is about the potential outside of the frame, where the reality of that image starts fizzing away and the studio begins. The work for her degree show started with a video performance in which she read her ‘Notes on Rage’ in a setting that reminds of political speeches. ‘Notes on Rage’ was written around the time that #metoo first came up and there was a lot of unrest, discontent and anger everywhere, which Laura identified as rage. Rage, she says, sits deeper, dormant, and when it comes out, it is more likely to eat you up rather than hurt anyone else. She then placed the video in a bigger installation that mimicked the settings of the set that the video itself was filmed in.

The installation as a set became a place where action could happen - a set is always ready for a spontaneous outbursts of action. And action did happen! The work was not a passive installation, but became a backdrop for her performance. ‘Notes on Rage’ dealt with the feeling of underrepresentation and being unheard. It investigated how violent the act of silencing can be and how this rage could feel - bodily. “You lose your head”. This lead to research and more writings about women throughout history who were or felt headless. This book was in flux, in progress for the whole duration of the exhibition. The goal was to finish and print it for the end of the exhibition. Laura would be present at all time in her set, talking to people, writing and drawing. Once a day she would have an official reading of one of the chapters of the book. But a more private reading could happen at any time. “It’s really exposing to write a book, but it’s even more exposing to write about your own experience. And then to read it out to somebody.” In performances like this, Laura doesn’t build a persona. It is all her. We all perform, she says, and these performances are about getting closer to being herself.

Working performatively gives her a certain freedom to make her own opportunities since she doesn’t need a white box gallery to give her a platform to show her work. She has grown an extensive network in London (and around) and is making things happen. We have also established that she does not sleep, after she told me that her usual production speed would be to do one thing a month. Lately, her works have gotten more deep and complex though, and might take a bit more time to come together. But she never produces into the blue. There’ll be a deadline and something to work towards that will force her to finish the work and put it out into the world. But making performative work isn’t all fun and candies (or goo and nail bars in Laura’s case). It’s hard to be considered at the same level as other artforms. Performance artists get asked to fluff around as entertainment at exhibition openings and the like. And on top of that, no one collects performances (how would you go about it even and isn’t the whole point of it to belong to the performer!?). But Laura’s recent practice put some more physical works into the world. She has some drawings and works on paper and her writing. Even with all the downsides, Laura says she wouldn’t want to change her practice. There’s a fascinating urgency for something immediate, it’s an ephemeral medium.

Laura Dee Milnes as Dee MacDonald, Klub Singers’ Klassik Karaoke Klub, Art Licks Party, Peckham Liberal Club (2014)

This all sounds super serious, but Laura’s practice is far from that. While she addresses important social and political issues and discourses, fun and humour is essential to her work. There’s Dee McDonald, the host of the Klub Singers’ Klassik Karaoke Klub (2014), a real life Karaoke Klub, open to anyone. Dee is a stereotype of a northern England working class woman. She has a talent for getting people in the right (cheery) mood - which she has learned working on cruise ships. But more than just being cheery, the persona of Dee asks questions about the female, hosting, caring. Another workshop of hers during the Supernormal festival in 2017 was a DIY nail bar, where she invited people to do their own nails and to forget about all the rules and encouraged them to get it wrong, which resulted in a woman gluing herself to her kid (an accident!?). The year before that during the same festival, she ran a dart booth installation. People were given choices of different pieces of clothing and encouraged to build their own dart playing persona. The idea behind these workshop is to provide or build a communal activity environment. Laura has great stories about ‘The Baggage Handler’, a persona from the Dart Workshop that has become a manifest of how her work provides the groundwork for so many things. By becoming personas, Laura has found her voice and through these workshops, she gives people a chance to do the same by offering them a platform and the props for their personas.