The talking mirror performance was based on a childhood family experience of my father watching my three sisters and I through a mirror in the kitchen. The eye contact he was enabled to make via the object of the mirror allowed for intimacy and connection he found hard to make with us directly. It was more comfortable for him to contact us in this was than directly through the physicality of bodies and intimidations of young female personalities.

I used this image, this action as the basis for the performance and I walked backwards through the crowd of people in the space using only the mirror to navigate and engage with others. I experienced an ease of engagement with others while using the mirror as a mediation object in the performance. The mirror as object between audience members and I, allowed for an openness and intimacy, unselfconsciousness or more accurately, a sense of self liberated from conventions, etiquette and the behaviours we commonly use in our interactions with each other. People in conversation through the mirror commented on the oddness of addressing an inverted image, the simultaneously distancing and affecting experience of reversal. The rules of engagement were suspended in this action and new freedoms to gaze at each other were enabled. There was a strong sense of liberation from the constraints of socially acceptable looking, I felt allowed to look at others frankly and I offered myself up to be looked at in return.

Another aspect of this work was the impression made by my walking backwards and the meaning of this as a gesture. It made me vulnerable; I was moving slowly and awkwardly, there was a potential danger from falling, especially on the stairs. In the performance I felt this action to reveal a release from other social conventions of behaviour, of being straight (walking forwards) – it was like playing a game in public, and it felt subversive and exciting.