VENUS AS A BOY

 Venus as a Boy   “I’ve always known it is I. Please take a serpentine streamer. Separate them carefully. Now blow a breath onto each one of them. Attach one end of the streamer to my skull. Make sure to attach them close to each other so that they cover my head. Then and only then, will my mind be made up. I am Venus as a Boy.”   

This performance is inspired by by Björk Guðmundsdóttir’s song of the same name (It was released in 1993 the year after I myself had released my first sperm emission) ,by  Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus which was painted in 1485-1486 using egg tempera on canvas, the same eggs, Björk so poetically fried in the music video by Sophie Muller, by Maria Linnea Codrington Forsyth, who gave me two iridescent serpents on my return to Iceland after 8 years. Venus as a Boy is also inspired by all the women who were stolen from Irish soil, to enrich the poetry and DNA of Iceland. These snakes directly inspired this new work. For 2 hours the audience is invited to engage in this performance, before I wash ashore. This work is dedicated to the memory of those stolen women and honours what they brought to Iceland.  

 Photographer: Paul Gibson