Nicknames - Celebrated Sobriquets aka Always Known As
My work explores the construction of identity through visual culture. I have been using the nicknames and alter egos teenagers give themselves, often seen written on walls in urban environments and used as alias names on early community sites such as Myspace.
As part of Celebrated Sobriquets I also created a Myspace portal in which teenagers’ profile text is reinterpreted and spoken through the voices of young Victorian girls and showgirls.
The work examines playing at being adult, imitation, performance, and the desire to construct a convincing public self.
The title Celebrated Sobriquets is a play on Tennessee Williams’ The Celebrated Soubrette, a "slapstick tragedy" about an ageing showgirl desperately trying to relive her former success in order to impress new acquaintances. Williams describes her as appearing "in bedraggled tutu, the remnant of her theatrical wardrobe; her hair is a fuzz of pink-orange curls. Like a puppet, she performs on command, delivering her outmoded numbers in a quavering voice. She is pathetically anxious to please, offering her dilapidated scrapbook to any who will look..."
The change from "Soubrette" to "Sobriquet" shifts the emphasis towards pseudonyms and constructed identities.
I was also interested in Williams’ tragic heroines, such as Blanche DuBois, who create lives they would rather inhabit and then try to convince those around them that these imagined identities are real. The girls in Celebrated Sobriquets similarly present versions of themselves through aliases such as "Lady Diamond" and "Thug Angel".
For the exhibition at The Surgery, I made these nicknames from discarded teenagers’ clothing, painstakingly shaping the fabric into childlike bubble lettering to create these often bombastic alter egos.
The fabric names were shown alongside a series of etched mirror works incorporating the same nicknames with portraits of young girls. As viewers looked into the mirrors, they saw their own reflections framed within the faces of the girls. These mirror pieces were painted using nail varnish, and the portraits were based on photographs by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), whose photographic work included young girls and child performers from the music hall.
