My performance work enacts the writing of the body through tongue on flesh. The ink trickles down the body, glistening on the skin, pooling in crevices, enticing goose bumps to the surface. As the model peels out of the white suit, the vulnerability of exposed flesh is masked by textual gestures continually re-written. The body becomes the page, the embodied text on show, under scrutiny and surveillance by the voyeurs in the street, gallery or theatre.

I work through a process of using tongue writing to generate a range of performances, videos and installations. Tongue writing is a process in which I use my tongue to write with coloured liquid in my mouth onto plastics, glass and/or flesh; an impermanent diary of gestural traces. In video I utilise multiple cameras, spy cameras and surveillance mechanisms to place the text under scrutiny.

As a universally ‘foreign’ language, tongue writing positions every viewer as the other in the symbolic order, without privileging one race over another. As a strategy of l’ecriture feminine, which presents performative written/spoken text as traces outside interpretive grammatology, tongue writing is also a product of cross-cultural experience. I am specifically interested in the process of cultural displacement that occurs within cross-cultural homosexual relationships within a climate of surveillance and an increase in fear of difference.

Through utilising large-scale projections, multimedia installations and performances I am aiming to explore the possibility of re-inserting the intimacy of the writing process (the textual interface) back into the surveillance streams. Surveillance mechanises and de-humanises interpersonal exchanges, my work uses scale and repetition to create intimacy and build a tapestry of recognition.