BIDDY
BIDDY is a performance event curated by Clare Carswell and Peta Lloyd showcasing works by experienced women performance artists over the age of fifty.
The performances will highlight a broad range of issues including the changing body and physical appearance, the need to maintain and test endurance and strength, the ability to motivate and empower others and ideas related to the close and playful nature of women’s friendships.
We will challenge the stereotype of the BIDDY and derogatory descriptions of older women through celebrating the voices and visibility of the artists and promoting positive images of skilled, talented and fabulous older women.
Clare Carswell, 'SUGAR SUGAR' Modern Art Oxford for LAPER 2018. Photo : Stu Allsopp
Curated by COU COU
COU COU is an artist led non profit project based near Oxford that has hosted artist residencies and exhibitions since 2010. It is curated by Clare Carswell. COU COU invites applications from artists in the UK, and internationally, to exhibit, screen or perform work in the studio project space and at other venues and events.
We collaborate with other arts organisations and curators to develop and run projects. Our newest project, BIDDY, launching at FaB 2022 will celebrate and promote the work of women artists over 50 and is being curated with performance artist and curator Peta Lloyd.
Contributing Artists
VORTESSA Lady Helena Vortex & Miss Giovanna Maria Casetta
VORTESSA was born out of a necessity to explore and create work concerning woman who arrive at the wrong side of fifty, encountering society which immediately marginalises them, removing their sexual currency, taking away their voice and rendering them invisible. During their recent work it has emerged that older women need to be nurtured, looked after, learn to love their gorgeous ageing bodies, inhabit a safe space to do so and be valued. Founder members are artists Miss Giovanna Maria Casetta and Lady Helena Vortex who have 35 years experience of working in Live Art , performance and film.
DENISE BRYAN
Denise Bryan is an artist based in London who makes sculptures, mixed media installations and performance works that have been shown both nationally and internationally. During her career she has undertaken residencies, made commissioned work and work involving local communities in non gallery spaces, she has often worked with historical museums.
The artists work often draws on her extensive experience of travelling. This includes having made several important pilgrimages, the resulting works act as a narrative of personal experience and in a broader sense the pieces interrogate our relationship to the exotic, our physical experience of travel and how we can navigate ourselves in this post colonial, global environment.
CLARE CARSWELL
Clare Carswell MA (RCA), is a British/Irish artist working with performance, drawing and installation to make works for the gallery, platform events or the public space in the UK and internationally,
Clare uses song or the spoken word as well as strategies of play, comedy and improvisation in works that are open to situation and moment. They use object, gesture and the drawn mark to make vibrant works that are interactive and that migrate between the planned and the spontaneous. She seeks to engage with audience to invoke personal or collective culturally resonant memories and to propose new and inventive ways of sharing our stories and imaginings. Contrived acts of arrival, greeting, welcome and temporary settlement appear in works that reflect on the impulse to identify place as home and the embodied memories of the Irish diaspora.
Recent works hover between ward round and slapstick as they reference the tragedy and comedy of inhabiting a changing older body, the need to maintain and test endurance and strength, and the continuing desire to motivate and connect with others through acts of imagination.
JENNY WYLIE
“I am mid-century born and not very tall - but I am taller than I remember my grandmother being. The new millennium was well under way when I entered higher education, for the first time, and following a Fine Art BA, achieved an MA in Social Sculpture. Part time study, full time work and family life stretched the available hours and those invisible threads which hold life in place.
On recently leaving paid employment, timetables, daily structure and routine have given way to, well? Those threads have yet to be tested, I am hoping the elasticity can still hold up.”
ALEXANDRA HOLOWNIA
Alexandra was born in Wrzesnia in Poland, and is based in Berlin. She is a Graduate of Art University of Berlin. She works as a performance artist and interdisciplinary conceptual artist. Her feministic works call for socio-political tolerance, acceptance of human rights and freedom of sexual self-determination.
“Thematically my works are concerned with gender and sexuality. I am in favour of freedom, tolerance as well as breaking the taboo of the vagina, but above all the rights of women and the right to sexual self-determination and transgender. The more often we raise topics related to sexuality the greater the chance will be for social acceptance and the overthrow of patriarchy.”
DIANA MILSTEIN
“I am a 72 year old woman, primarily a visual artist. I have been painting my character ‘Miss Smith” for the last 27 years. Eventually she stepped out of the picture frame into physical form. In 2019 I performed my one woman show , “Stairway to the stars”. Miss Smith has realised that the only way to look at the ageing process and death is with a sense of humour !”
GEN DOY
“After working for many years as a university lecturer in history and theory of visual culture, I qualified as a fine artist, graduating with an M.A.(distinction) from University of the Arts London in 2013. I also have an M.A. in History of Fine Art and French Language and Literature from Glasgow University, and a Ph.D. in History of Art from the University of Essex. My published books deal with issues of “race”, gender, sexuality and the politics of representation.
I use various media in my work, particularly sound and live performance. I also work with still and moving images, written and spoken texts, in order to construct narratives that are not linear, but suggestive, evocative and open to creative interpretation by the viewer and listener. I am interested in myth, history and the many ways in which the historical can collide and interact with the contemporary. Giving voice to, and making visible, people and events which have been ignored or marginalised is important to me, as is the creation of a political artistic practice.”
ANNIE RAPSTOFF
Annie Rapstoff is a cross disciplinary artist, whose practice is often responsive to place and context. She is particularly interested in the interface between the environment and urban/rural spaces. Work is often process based, taking the form of projects, workshops, events, performance, video, web-based work and interventions.
Annie explores ways of engagement, often experientially, unsettling known structures and shifting the proximity between artist, audience and or participants. In negotiating particular situations and sites, she attempts to engage and facilitate further possible histories related to identity, myth, narrative and ritual.
PETA LLOYD
"My performances are usually the expression of an idea I find amusing. I use mundane and everyday materials. My actions usually involve struggle which adds an element of precariousness and generates a humorous response related to the incongruity between the concept and the objects."