Eve Travis. Blockhead.

About

A multi media exhibition, comprising performance, wearable art, sculpture, photography and video work, Blockhead, the debut solo show of artist and performer Eve Travis, seeks to explore the dichotomy of disempowerment and empowerment for women onstage. Through the lens of the sideshow, Blockhead also raises notions of objectification and fetishization, and the relationship of women’s bodies to pain and endurance, in life and as spectacle.

The Human Blockhead is a carnival or sideshow performer who hammers a nail or other implement into his or her nasal cavity via the nostrils, a stunt which is often performed alongside a bed of nails act, in which the performer lies a top a rectangular piece of wood with numerous nails sticking up out of it. Performances which appear both dangerous and immensely painful as well as inhuman with the aim of shocking audiences.
Historically, the sideshow has provided “a designated and unique space which offered access to the ‘other’” (Problem Bodies and Sideshow Space, Pugh, 2020) and whilst operating outside of society, has been a site for both societal reflection and continued negotiation regarding the politicised sphere of the body, creating a space in which to confront, and exaggerate. According to Durbach, sideshow performers were in “collaboration with the audience whose spectatorship itself shaped the construct of the performer’s body as aberrant” (Spectacle of Deformity, Durbach, 2009).

By focusing on, and exaggerating the reactive moment where the object meets body and exploring the body as material, Eve attempts to subvert the potential for objectification. Through recreating, repurposing and misusing props, costume and make-up from her career as a sideshow performer, she aims to dissect the sideshow in relation to gender expectations and performativity. Her discarded make-up wipes – traces from stage and playing with personas in the studio, are transformed into multiple masks which act as a presence in the space. Masks are defined as a “covering for all or part of the face, worn as a disguise, or to amuse or frighten others”, in this case the masks displace the performer portraying stripped back personas to offer an intimate insight into the guises used on stage. Her sculpture ‘Bed of Nails’ features as object and in photographs, made from acrylic, its transparency allows for flesh to be photographed through the bed capturing the moment the body connects with, and is sculpted and distorted by, the nails conveying the discomfort and pain the performer must endure. Finally, a video work in which the artist uses her body and her sideshow skills to create abstract imagery, accompanied by audio in which female, trans and nonbinary performers can be heard discussing their relationship to their body and how that is impacted by their performance practice, their experiences on stage, and their audience, explores ideas of performativity, self-image, and societal pressures for performers onstage.

Blockhead intends to capture the viewer as the sideshow captures its audience, offering insight into performers experiences by exhibiting performance traces and props whilst sharing performers’ stories, to explore gender performativity and gender expectations both on and offstage.