Cuckoo

Cuckoo is a comedic endurance performance piece exploring the experience of being an artist within the current local capitalist economy, in which creatives have to constantly present themselves, pouring energy, time and identity into what can be seen by audiences only in glimpses. At the strike of every hour, I descended the stairs as if in a Cuckoo clock and sang Journey’s Don't Stop Believin’ to a hurried swathe of uni students moving between classes. Linking to the absurdity and chaos of pursuing art as a career, the performance got more disheveled and out of tune throughout the day, culminating in me cutting my hair in jagged clumps from exhaustion on the final performance. The documentation of the work (with a big tripod in the centre of the walkway) invites questions around what is seen and unseen, what labour we validate and gives voice to the fickle, heart on sleeve humour and self-awareness of being an artist in our culture.