Artist Statement

Eve Travis is a multidisciplinary artist currently working with performance, traces, soft sculpture and installation with a view to exploring identity and gender performativity.

After graduating with first class honours in Fine Art from Staffordshire University,  she completed an artist residency at AirSpace Gallery culminating in her inaugural solo show Blockhead. Whilst working as a circus and cabaret performer, she aims to dissect the intersection between theatrical performance, live art and the performances of our everyday lives whilst investigating what and where constitutes as a stage or performance space. Coming from a performance background informs her contemplation of performativity, masking, and identity. Her personal experiences of performing on and off stage, both intentionally and otherwise, fuel and influence her line of enquiry. 

Through the use of her body, and by deconstructing beauty products, she disrupts notions of beauty, gender expectations and social conditioning. Through the misuse of make-up, wigs, and garments in her performances, she exhausts their potential for misuse to draw attention to their inherent futility. Her aim is for the physical deconstruction and misuse of these items to metaphorically deconstruct what it is to be beautiful, questioning and critiquing societal expectations by subverting beauty standards. Through further misuse of specialised stage props and her circus and sideshow skills, she distorts, disfigures and sculpts her body testing both endurance and pain thresholds to disturb her audience to subvert potential for objectification and explore the duality of disempowerment and empowerment for women on stage. 

By rebuffing ideas of what is expected and appropriate, according to values imposed on us by society, she explores where power lies and with whom. Personal feelings of powerlessness inform this part of her practice. Critiquing identity construction through social pressure and gender expectation, by building personas and dissecting them through performance, she questions how identity is formed and why. 

Her practice is inspired by artists such as Rosie Gibbens, Rebecca Horn and Marina Abramovic as well as the writing of gender theorist Judith Butler.