Marie-Gabrielle Rotie
Blodeuwedd: She’s neither Owls nor Flowers.
October, Leyton, London. 2024.

see https://www.rotie.co.uk/blodeuwedd

During the Covid pandemic in 2020, I bonded with a Barn Owl (Tyto Alba) that visited my garden, night, and day, seeming to act as a mythological guide and witness to the traumatic unravelling of a marriage. Incarnating the Welsh mythical Blodeuwedd, man-made of flowers but turned into an owl, became the channel to bring to light, exorcise and heal wounds, in acts of alchemical transformation. Alan Garner’s The Owl Service (1967) based on the myth of Blodeuwedd and Remedios Varos painting Creation of the Birds (1958), where the main figure is both alchemist witch-owl-bird and creative artist, are other points of literary and visual reference.

The Research concerns are surmised as exploring:

1. The intersections of Butoh and Performance Art. From Butoh, I investigate the centrality of inner bodily transformation and transfiguration and continue research work in ‘Becoming Animal’ and also ‘States of Possession’.

From performance art, I draw upon methods of repetition, ritual and the centrality of the artists body in the moment of making and unmaking. In the genesis of performance art, the body is an object, a stand in for the work of ‘art’ and as a result movement is very often action-based or pedestrian or renders the artists a tableau or ‘stillness’ (Howell, 1999). The work seeks to find a meeting of what seem to be two quite contrary performance methodologies: the inner physical transformation of Butoh with the ‘action’ of performance art.

Butoh in fact has its historical roots in action and street protest (see Gutai Group and butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata’s works in 1950’s) but became increasingly orientated towards inner processes of bodily transformation through ‘a reversal in the aesthetic consciousness.’ (Kazuko Kuniyoshi, 1995)

2. The research process looks back to the pioneering work of 1970’s feminist artists, particularly those associated with so called ‘Goddess Spirituality’ and ‘’the potential of myth for feminist struggles and for the role of mythical imagery in the construction of both Individual and collective identities.’’ (Rebecchi, 2023). Women artists of this time created rituals, inspired by ‘goddess imagery’ to address socio-political injustices, ecocide and gender violence. I refer to mainly first-generation feminist performance artists Mary Beth Edelson, Betsy Damon, Ana Mendieta and in particular Suzanne Lacy’s ‘She who would fly’ as part of her work on violence against women, Three weeks in May (1977).

3. My performance embodied research situates at the intersection of corporeal feminism (Grosz) with the transformative visceral force of the abject (Kristeva) and searches for a embodied meeting of the material and the immaterial, through the intermediary of the mythological ‘feminine’.

The Performance: a plate full of bolus and bones.

The site-based performance took place in a derelict Victorian house in Leyton on October 12th 2024, in an event The Visitations, hosting seven artists, co-produced with Stella Pearce.

The plates that inspired Alan Garner's novel The Owl Service were a dinner service designed by Christopher Dresser for Old Hall Pottery in the 1880s; the pattern was influenced by his travels in Japan.

The installation comprises of dinner plates that replicate the Christopher Dresser pattern, and that cascade from the walls and onto the floor and are printed with UK statistics on domestic violence and my own poetic writing. The plates are laid with fragments of bones collected in my garden, from birds and small mammals as well as dried flowers associated with healing.

The performance methodology seeks to find a bridge between the philosophy of Butoh (of which I am in international expert-practitioner) and the methods of Performance Art and revolves around a cyclical act of eating harmful words so typical of those said during domestic abuse, printed on paper, and the violent regurgitation of them to form ejected bolus, echoing the owl’s habit of casting fur and bones. This act of 'casting' sees the transformation of internalised wounds, into acts of creative and embodied interjection, playing on the borders between the abject and the sacred. The work is a ritual that is beyond the personal and seeks to bring to light, on behalf of other women, that which often remains hidden and unspoken. The bolus becomes an uncanny intermediary between the inside/outside, both gift and weapon, both vomit and sign of creative agency.
The bolus becomes the artefact of ingestion, expulsion, repulsion and then finds its way as a transformed ‘gift’ (a term used by Melanie Klein and Winnicott on object-relations) into the world.

Thomas, Gwyn, Margaret Jones, and Kevin Crossley-Holland. Tales from the Mabinogion. London: Gollancz, 1989.

Garner, Alan. The Owl Service. London: HarperCollins Children’s Books, 2017.

'Remedios Varo, Creation of the Birds, c.1957.

Howell, Anthony, The Analysis of Performance Art a Guide to Its Theory and Practice. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1998

Kazuko Kuniyoshi, Butoh in the late 1980s, Japan Foundation, 1995.

Clelia Rebecchi,' Laughing has 1,000 mothers: the grotesque goddesses of Mary Beth Edelson,' Burlington Contemporary, June 2023., London. Journal article

Suzanne Lacy’s ‘She who would fly’ as part of her work on violence against women, Three weeks in May (1977). (https://www.suzannelacy.com/three-weeks-in-may).

Kristeva, Julia, and Leon Roudiez. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024.

Grosz, E. A. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/37816