My current research project examines the potential of the decorative as an impetus for performance. It asks the question; Can Mihaela Criticos’s Decorative Function; ‘the ability to turn a common object into an aesthetic one’, be applied to performance practice? The work has explored both the possibility of a ‘performance object’; giving permission to an audience to ignore it, and so deflect attention onto social space, and also decorative performance as a site for aesthetic experience.

Taking its cue from Richard Shusterman’s call for a renewed attention to an aesthetic perspective, rather than solely embracing his proposed popular (musical) performance, or the aesthetic within ‘the art of living’, the work considers a third site that does not need to avoid the traditional gallery context, and is derived from a performative re-visioning of the modernist autonomous object.

In Fill is an almost literal manifestation of Criticos’ premise. It presents a structured system of common activity, infiltrated and subverted by a decorative interjection. It considers the decorative as being necessarily ephemeral; the elimination of functionality through destruction.