This was the initial stages of a long-term project on the subject of ‘nakedness’ and ‘the nude’.
I conducted and filmed a series of ‘performative’ one on one interviews with teachers and students at Central Saint Martins on the subject of public nudity to research diverging cultural attitudes towards it.
I wished for my interviewees to be confronted with the very nature of the subject itself, and so I performed each interview naked. I wanted to play with the role of interviewer and interviewee, and the idea that both could be vulnerable and in control at different points.
I then created a short film of these responses, screening it as part of a project proposal for my MA at Central Saint Martins.
I was inspired by the story of Stephen Gough, known by the British media as ‘The Naked Rambler’, a man that has been imprisoned for almost a decade now for deciding not to wear clothes in public. I am attempting to undress (!) our morally conflicted relationship with the naked body. In Britain there is no law against nudity - despite this, Gough has been criminalised and kept in solitary confinement.
Gough says:
"I was brought up to believe I lived in a country that celebrated eccentricity and difference, not only because it added variety and colour to the otherwise slavish conformity that can feel depressive, constricting and sometimes just downright boring, but that it also indicated a deeper appreciation of how the unorthodox, at its very essence, is how originality and creative energy manifests itself - that without the freedom to express our individuality and uniqueness in our own way, something inside us dies, and we can the world around us become less vital.”
Is he perverted, admirable or aggressive? Every person I have spoken to about Gough has a different opinion.
I intend to follow the first phase of this project with further ‘naked interviews’ outside of Central Saint Martins as well as performances which deal with our conflicted relationship to the nude in art and public nudity.
