Watching our grocer weigh different fruits and vegetables and being aware of the fulcrum moment when there was a pause before the scales aligned into a stillness and equilibrium, fascinated me as a child. I became interested in balances and volume/mass/weight equivalences. A significant work for me in terms of insight and realisation of the performance /sculpture cross over, was balancing my own body weight against a pyramid sculpture of the same weight as me.

This sculpture was the equivalent shape of my body with legs apart and arms forming a point above my head. Using poles suspended in trees and rope I worked on a balance between body weight and sculpture. I did all the lifting and manoeuvring. This led to my excitement about art as process; the animation of exploring and adjusting the weight and tension, was more fulfilling to me than the end result. I later did several works with pulley systems. Another work I did using the tension of my own body and a sculptural equivalent in one or more aspects was making a sculpture of a figure of approximately my weight (there was a parcel scale in the entrance to the art department which I used to weigh many different objects) and pulling it taut by a string tied between us.

The crouching body was in a foetal shape. I worked on several more sculptural and performance works based on my shape in foetal position. I made ‘ foetal burial mounds’ made with soil, which were my shape and size in this position so that the ‘pregnant’ earth could also be the container for the ‘dead.’ I experimented with this shape, making performances such as ‘teaching foetuses’ where I would do drawings and small sculptural works for the ‘foetus.’ ‘Shadow of a Ghost, Ghost of a Shadow’ was a piece in which I placed the hardboard ‘foetal’ figure of myself in sunlight and I cut out a shape in canvas of the shadow that was cast from the figure. I then replaced this shaped canvas ‘shadow’ with the hardboard and then cut out the shadow cast from that, in canvas. This shape from the shadow of the shadow continued on and on, cutting each out in canvas, until the original shape had completely morphed.