A Fine Art Masters student is appearing on the same bill as award winning comic Richard Herring at an up and coming London performance and noise art festival, which showcases controversial and under-represented work.
student Natalie Ramus, 32, has based her piece on her children’s teeth, exploring the way they were formed inside her own body. She will perform it for the first time at Tempting Failure Festival at Hackney Showrooms on July 28th, just before Richard Herring takes to the stage.
Natalie, from Nelson, Caerphilly, said of the piece, called Teeth (of) My Children, “My practice is concerned with the abject and autonomous body. I am fascinated with not only the unravelling body, but also the body as a system of processes and also production.”
“For my performance I will be making use of my children’s teeth which I have collected over the years. I am fascinated with the fact that the teeth came into existence inside my body, and then left my body inside my child. Then as my children lost their teeth, they have returned to me. I am interested in exploring this material through performative action, which will hopefully raise a dialogue surrounding the materiality of the body and also the body as a site of creation.”
Natalie is mum to Leon 12, Holly 10, Lilly eight and Joseph, six. Her solo performance will be documented and filmed in order for it to be assessed as part of her Masters degree.
Her children do not know their teeth have become art, as Natalie, who lives in Hay on Wye, explains: “They think their teeth are with the tooth fairy so I have had to be very careful! When they first started losing their teeth I developed fairy characters who leave letters for the children talking about their life in the fairy village.”
“The children have really bonded with these characters! Leon has now reached that age where he no longer leaves teeth out for the tooth fairy. I suppose as parents we are transitioning into the next phase of parenthood, and my children are slowly, moving out of childhood one by one. I think this moving away or loss of childhood seems to comes through in the performance.”
“The teeth are objects which are heavily loaded with associated meaning – they are also universally familiar and so trigger memories in the viewer of their experience of that material.”
Tempting Failure is a festival of international performance art and noise art, showcasing under-represented or extreme artwork that may interrogate risk or challenge preconceptions.
The festival prides itself on showcasing a programme of artwork that is usually side-lined by producers and arts venues for being logistically too difficult, unexpected, prone to censorship or perhaps deemed too ‘extreme’.
Natalie has also been asked to work with David Lagaccia from Incident Magazine, New York, which will feature her work online.
Natalie says: “Thanks to meeting festival director Thomas John Bacon, I will be performing at a festival alongside so many artists who have been a part of my research – it seems so surreal!”
The festival runs from 21st to the 29th July in both Hackney and Croydon, London. http://www.temptingfailure.com
Details of Natalie’s performance are available here: https://www.facebook.com/events/508451952696150/ and www.natalieramus.com begins with a Private View on September 9th and runs until the September 14th: cardiff-school-of-art-and-design.org