SHR6E032F~002 PLO23085725 Portfolio and Video Evidence

1. Project Overview

“Feminine Indulgences” is a collaboration with multi-media artist “Mads Mcguinness” featuring electronic music and physical performance. It has been performed in a variety of venues ranging from gig venues such as “Little Buildings” in Newcastle or “Hyde Park Book Club” to art exhibition settings such as “Assembly House” an exhibition at “Eiger Studios”. Our initial collaboration and first live itteration of “Feminine Indulgences” opened the door for future opportunities, with the former leading to “Flower Shop” reaching out to us for a performance and the latter leading to multiple projects with Rosaline Zipporah, Lucy Young and Lily Honey-Doyle.

The project features me as an electronic music performer slouched on the floor soundtracking a physical performance art piece by Mads, who, over the course of 10 minutes, utilises the space while displaying actions of social defiance, entertainment and indulgence. The piece aims to depict feminine and queer endurance and liberation through actions, outfits and music that is deemed socially abject.

2. Panopto Video – Final Product (10-12 Minutes)

3. Chronological Monthly Diary

The timeline of this project was scattered due to none of the shows being booked by us. Repeat performances relied upon other event organisers reaching out to us. gaps in work time were largely due to term breaks. (clips of other performances in app 3)

This Graph displays the different phases of development and preparation for each performance and the performances day at the bottom of each group

December:

8th December 2025: Wayzgoose at Assembly House:

Art exhibition for Leeds Arts University (LAU) students in venue space in Armley.
Required planning and setup of mobile PA as venue did not have usable PA.
Mads and I were approached about bringing our performance to another exhibition. (app 1)

Development:

one of the things we struggled with was having a strong enough syndergy between mine and Mads’ aspects of the performance and so we developed more of an understanding of the music progresses, and talking about how to react to eachother more.

January:

23th January 2026: Coalesence at Eiger Studios:

Featured new section in latter half of track.
Student & postgrad multimedia event.
shortest period we had to prepare for show.
Featured sculptures by women from LAU working in metalwork alongside photography from “ebberston collective”.
First time performing on dedicated stage, closer to a gig than an art performance.

April:

4th April 2026: Flower Shop at Little Buildings:

Fundraiser for struggling venue.
Mads was reached out to by organisers (Flower Shop) of previous show Mads performed at.
Live gig setting as opposed to exhibition space.

26th April 2026: Vivacious at Hyde Park Book Club:

“sapphic social and art market” featuring our performance.
Most likely final performance of “Feminine Indulgences”.

May:

“Feminine Indulgences” is now available to purchase on Bandcamp as a digital download. Files contain recordings of the Hyde Park Book Club performance of the project. This allows the project to be archived and accessible to those who want to support and experience it.

4. Evidence of Planning/Process

due to the small scale of the project, lots of the planning involved brainstorming and sketches before going away to work on our own individual contributions and meeting to share progress.

After the initial performance of “Feminine Indulgences” at Assembly House in Armley, our focus was on making the performance more engaging through extra sections in the music and more structure and synergy between Mads’ and my performances.

I used the platform “Untitled” to share demos of the music to Mads (app 2). Untitled allows users to seamlessly upload, update and download work-in-progress music between collaborators.

images of planning and development of outfit materials found in app 7.

5. Reference Material/Inspiration

There are some core principles that outline the process and experience of Feminine Indulgences:

Accessibility: this was in the contexts in which we chose to perform the work – performing in a gig setting has a different connotation to an art gallery and is considered a less classy and more casual context. Part of the project is allowing fine art to exist in spaces that aren’t traditionally suited for fine art. Additionally while parts of the performance pull from noise and sound collage, some parts pull from more “dancable” electronic music and are therefore more accessible. Additionally, my involvment in the project provides Mads access to musical performance and creation which aren’t parts of her practice.
Vicerality: Audience interaction, abrasive sounds and striking ouftits make for a more viceral or captivating viewing experience.
versatility: there are many sectors and disciplines in the creative scene and allowing them to co-exist & intersect opens more oppurtunities for artists in any of those disciplines. Despite the fine art context of the project, we found a wide beadth of applicability in different contexts for gigging and exhibition work. This is in part due to the wide range of influences in many disciplines.
Intersectionallity: the narrative surrounding our piece is one of ernest defiance and documentation of under-represented voices through art and it’s my intention that the cultural collage on display allows different

influences on the piece include:

Culture Jamming – anti-consumerist movement based on re-purposing the messaging of capitalism to convey political messages. (MoMa, 2022) (Pickerel, Jorgensen and Bennett, n.d.)
Bootlegging (Schwartz, 2024)
Queer nightlife & fetish culture. Fedorova, A. (2026)
Mads has cited: Wallace Berman, Gina Birch, Nan Goldin and Barbra Kruger as artists’ work that influenced this piece.
My influences include: Oneohtrix point never, Death Grips, Slauson Malone 1 and SOPHIE.

6. Use of Technology

My contribution to this project is a live looped performance in Ableton Live using primarily midi controlellers. the styles of music performed are ambient and electronic dance music which are both styles that encorporate promenant repetition, this allows me to focus on using controllers to manipulate mapped perameters in plugins/devices within ableton. My plans from my original “Ableton Set Plan” (App 6) remained quite similar throughout the changes to the project.

I used Ableton’s built in ability to record performances done in the “session view” into the “arrangement view”, allowing me control over the mix after the project has already been performed. I had never done this with a live performance set before and so this unfamiliarity lead to problems with the recording at almost every show.

The experience of working with these sounds was simmilar to that of a DJ set , but rather than just mixing tracks together, I was introducing and manipulating the textures and nature of the sounds and1 the dynamics of the music in real time.

Issues:

at “Wayzgoose” the project was not set up to record properly and so the final recording in Ableton was Unusable.
At “Coalescence” I forgot to record the set entirely.
at “Flower Shop” I pressed the pause button, thankfully there are elements of the project that still make sound even when the project is paused, meaning the audience were unlikely to have noticed the pause.

7. Evaluation

Individual Shows:

“Wayzgoose” at “Assembly House”:

Required the most setup for our performance space as I had to set up a mobile PA and help to designate the performance space. We used the lounge space as opposed to the exhibition space due to the sheer amount of artist exhibiting at this event, this allowed us more freedom to control our performance space without worrying about or having to risk assess the other artist’s works and overall reduced factors that could have lead to complications.
The performance itself went largely as planned and Mads’ movements greatly complimented the music I had made. The mobile PA was mostly suitable for the job – although the bass-heavy nature of the track lead to some of the low end punch in the track being lost, thankfully there was enough harmonics and complexity within the sounds to allow for a mostly fully represented version of the track to come through on the PA.
I made a mistake setting up the in-the-box recording for the show, meaning I did not have a clear audio recording of the project to accompany the video I had taken. This poor planning lead to me not using this version as my final submission.
The space provided was suitable for what we wanted to do, however the venue was very heavily packed, largely due to the number of artists exhibiting in the space. This meant that allowing mads to move through the audience or make quick movements would have been messy or dangerous. we made adjustments in our risk assesment.
I was able to open a dialog with the manager of “Assembly house”, a valuable connection for future oppurtunities in the space. We were also asked in person by Rosaline Zipporah who was looking for artists to collaborate on a future event in January for and were later contaced for details about the show.

Assembly House was a great venue despide the need for adjustments, our space reflected an almost domestic or leisurely space akin to a bar or coffee shop which worked well for our works themes of accesibility. I was very happy with my contributions in the form of the setting up of the PA system and management of live sound for the event. The crowd seemed engaged in the performance, though due to the nature of the event as afine art space rather than a gig space, things like dancing and crowd interaction were limited, this is a potential problem that persists in all performances of “Feminine Indulgences”.

The event itself lead to multiple connections with people, one of which lead to our next show, this was incredibly helpful as we did not have any budget for booking future shows ourselves. One of our problems preceeding the event was rehearsal spaces, we weren’t able to do a proper dressed rehearsal in a space with loud enough speakers and a wide enough space, so there was worries that we would be too under-rehearsed. Thankfully the final result felt mostly polished and fairly fully formed, though we both agreed that the sections were too long and could do with more variation.

Overall this was a sucessful event with some minor problems that did not greatly affect the final result.

“Coalesence” at “Eiger Studios”

we got involved in this event through Rosaline and Lucy, who wanted to put on an art exhibition featuring women in metal work and believed that our work would be a suitable accompaniment for the event. Ros, Lucy & Mads liaised with our contacts to the venue, two artists from “Ebberston Collective”. Main issues in the event came from early handling from those contacts, as they didn’t understand what aesthetics for this “women in metal work” exhibition for promotional material were suitable, despite images of the work being provided. The original proposed poster from Ebberston Collective were bright, colourful featuring images of nature, in contrast to the more industrial and mechanical works to be exhibited. These issues were rectified in future meetings but did create less trust in the organisers and set back promotion of the exhibition.
The space was a gig venue setup with a stage and audience space (app 9). In the audience space were exhibited metal works by Rosaline Zipporah, Lucy Young and Lily Honey-Doyle, there was a room to the side displaying photography by members of Ebberston Collective and a bar for drinks.
I did not record the set this time due to being unorganised. I thought it was important to document the performances for both the sake of the assignment and the ability to use recordings of the performances to sell on Bandcamp since there was an emphasis in the influences of the project on archiving. It would have been good idea to have a contingency for this problem, such as recording the output of my DAW through hardware or Ableton’s “resampling” feature.

Coalesence allowed us to experiment with the format of our project. The wider space allowed us more options for the performance. We were asked about using a table for my setup, however we decided that sitting on the floor reflected the comfortable and indulgent nature of the work.

Attendees were more closely met by Mads in this performance, creating more viceral experience. While the space itself was good, the exhibited works meant that more caution was taken in moving around the area, an audience member did at one point knock a piece , though it was not related to Mads specifically. Mads was able to work this into the performance by pretending to look overly cautious around the sculptures.

This project also lead to further collaboration with Ros and Lucy outside of “Feminine Indulgences”.

“Flower Shop” at “Little Buildings”

Small venue in Newcastle, meaning this was the first time we’d performed the piece in a gig setting. The new format prompted us to re-work the vocals for the piece. Mads was much more happy with these vocals and they fit in the track much more as they were akin to vocals of hardcore music.
Most technical issues we’d had were at this gig. This was due to poor planning on my part as the live set in Ableton was not set up properly and I hadn’t pracitced enough.
This event was very well attended, meaning that the space was more difficult to navigate during the performance in eiger studios.
Though this was a gig setting, there was still not much dancing, though crowd engagement was much higher, with audience members interacting with mads as she performed without much encouragement.

Overall I think this was the worst performance on my end. The technical difficulties were mostly caused by my poor planning and lack of practice due to the long gap between this and the last performance. I also ruined the recording by accidentally pausing the track (seen in app 3). The audience still enjoyed the performance and people I spoke to after didn’t realised that there were as many problems as there were.

“Vivacious” at “Hyde Park Book Club”

The setting of a queer art market was incredibly well suited to our performance, and was quite relaxed compared to both exhibition and gig settings that we had done previously.
The space was in “the snug” venue. This was simmilar – if not smaller – to the space we had in Assembly House. The advantage of HPBC was that the outside area was easily accessible, allowing Mads to play around with the space and create parts of the performance based around this in areas of the music that were less attention grabbing. This also allowed me to play with sounds in ways that reflected Mads’ actions in the space such as advancing the track as Mads came back inside around 4 minutes in.

Overall this was one of the best performances of the lot. This performance felt very fully realised, with all the sections feeling disticnt and complimentary to Mads’ work as a performer. The event itself was very well suited to the project as it spotlighted queer artists of all different styles and disciplines. One problem I did have was trying to find a satisfying way to enter the drop of the latter half of the song, and I think that the transition in this specific performance was particularly weak, though the build of the second half of the track into more abrasiveness was well executed.

Feminine Indulgences overall:

This project allowed me to experiment with live looping and live performance in ways I hadn’t yet explored. It also gave me closer access to projects and connections that I woudn’t have originally worked with. The overall success of this project has also led to me and Mads being offered a spot in an event at Wharf Chambers, where we will be creating a new piece. The positive feedback from audiences and the repeated bookings from event organisers has highlighted the possibilites of interdisciplinary collaboration in performance and beyond. I have a total of 14 new contacts as a result of this project and expect to continue doing shows in this area of work.

8. Bibliography

Fedorova, A. (2026). Second Skin. Catapult.

MoMa (2022). Barbara Kruger | MoMA. [online] The Museum of Modern Art. Available at: https://www.moma.org/artists/3266-barbara-kruger.

Pickerel, W., Jorgensen, H. and Bennett, L. (n.d.). Culture Jams and Meme Warfare: Kalle Lasn, Adbusters, and media activism Tactics in Global Activism for the 21 st century. [online] Available at: https://depts.washington.edu/ccce/assets/documents/pdf/culturejamsandmemewarfare.pdf [Accessed 4 May 2023].

Schwartz, B. (2024). Unlicensed. Valiz .