Sarah Kipp in conversation with Áine Phillips
26-5-07 Tompkins Sq Park, East Village, NYC

BIOGRAPHY:
www.sarahkipp.com
I studied painting at Penn State University and my first public performance took place in the spring of 1999. It was a piece about love using a mediated image of myself on a TV, which sat on my back as I lay on the floor. Together the two parts of my selves argued about the false perceptions of romance. It was around this time that I also began working with projection. In the summer of 1999 I projected an old slide of myself onto my back and presented a piece about my memories as a ten-year old, speaking simultaneously through my adult and child voice. I graduated from Penn State in 2001 with a BFA in Painting. In 2002 I moved to New York for graduate school at Queens College, where I received my MFA in 2004, I have remained in New York.
Through the use of the projected image, I allow the audience to see into the numerous parts of the selves which make up a person's identity. I use projections on my face and body, and sometimes people say the imagery is scary to them, haunting…so sometimes I use humor to lighten it. I want to reach out to the audience and discuss my ideas with them. For me it's a two way exchange, a relationship with the audience, it's immediate.


CONVERSATION:
Áine - Why did you start working with autobiography?


Sarah - When I was 18, I started as a painter, trying to figure out what was important and sharing myself, telling my own story in an honestly raw and vulnerable way. I was interested in artwork that dealt with abject humanness. When I was 4, I had open-heart surgery and I started to tell that story. There was a lot to tell psychologically and physically, combining the mental and physical aspects of self. When I started doing that I realised I wanted to talk about real things, and share, especially the painful things, with honesty. I want to take painful things and make them beautiful. I would rather deal with things that way.

I use images projected onto myself and I narrate a story. All the images I use in the performances are slides of me and my family, or autobiographical portrait paintings that I have created. I change the scale and the focus of the slides during the performances, while I move into and out of the images projected. The photographic slides I use are all old family slides, with many of myself as a baby and child. I think about the child self still being there, and I bring her out. I have never used an image of someone who wasn't family, aside from the paintings that I have created, which to me represents a kind of subconscious alter ego. This way of working is what makes sense to me.

Áine - How do you think of yourself in the performance, are you everyday Sarah or are you someone different, a part of these others projected onto you?

Sarah - Mostly I do feel like me. I don't consider it to be acting but in recent work I have been thinking more about going in and out of different identities, for example I will be Sarah and then I will be my Dad (in the performance).

Áine - How do you do that?

Sarah - I try to do it through tone, but I also do it with the projection of his image onto my face and body. I did a piece all about my father, I interviewed him, used his words and tried to change my voice tone (when speaking his words). I want to take on different voices but they are still part of me because they are my family. They are like spirits inside of me.

Áine - Similar to Karen Finley, who performs as others, taking on their voices. She changes her voice into that of another person and she explains it as a form of 'channelling' this other identity through herself. It's about finding your own voice too, the voice that represents who you are but also what you are trying to impart and achieve in the performance.

Sarah - I am very stubborn about finding my own voice.

Áine - In my work, my self image, who I am in the performance is an exceptional form of self. I make myself what I would like to be and perhaps do or say what I would like to do or say in the situation I am representing. I think this comes from an inadequacy, my insecurities and shyness – performance became a way to present the best form of Áine. It is a form of self creation in a controlled aesthetic framework. It is also a live self portrait.

Sarah - I make a monstrous self image using the projections and what they can do because of the way I work with it.
I am totally disguised. I go in and out of myself and these alter-egos. Different faces emerge, some are beautiful, some are ugly. It is hard to articulate why, but I like to show ugliness as part of the self too. It is also part of me. There's a creature inside of all of us and in my performances, that creature comes out.

Áine - Do you think the creature is the subconscious?

Sarah - It could be, but intellectually, the 'creature' is how I describe it for people. I think about who we are physically, genetically. We have our ancestors and family within us, coupled with our own emotional history and in the performances I like to think of bringing that out and connecting it with humanity.

Áine - From the personal to the political, the singular to the universal, how do you transcend that gap?

Sarah - I feel that by being very honest personally that enables me to reach a collective. Something personal may not seem political but we all go through things and by telling a personal story you can reach someone else very personally too.

Áine - So the crucial thing is honesty and integrity. If the work is fiction, is it possible for it to relate to others beyond yourself?

Sarah - Sometimes you can embellish a story to get a point across. I used to be extremely rigorous with the truth, but now I like to add embellishments, for the magic of it. It can make for a better story and add to the creativity. For example, I told a story my grandfather used to tell me when I was young and I added more to it. My grandfather was born in Africa and had typhoid fever and malaria at the age of 3. He travelled to Portugal and a doctor on arrival gave him pears. He always told that story. In my performance I made it more dramatic. There were poignant things about that story – as he lay on the ship, he saw his own coffin there. They had to bring it because they thought he would die. I added that if he was to die, he would be laid to rest in the mouth of the sea. I don't know if that was true but I added it.

Áine - Do you work with the story in a poetic way?

Sarah - I think about the story for a long time when I'm planning it, and let it seep in my mind. When I write (a 20-30 minute monologue), I usually do it in 2 days. It flows like a stream of consciousness, I want it to be in natural language.

I am very descriptive in my language. For example, in an early performance, called Am I Here? I placed the audience in the hospital bed with me and told the story from that point of view. I described what it was like with metal bars, my hair getting caught in them, the way the doctors looked with the morphine effect. I try to impart the visual in a different way, to be very descriptive to allow the audience picture what it's like.

Áine - I consciously decided to work in a poetic form which frees me from an exact literal-ness to life. This is also a strategy to deal with the problem of implicating others in my autobiography. How do you write about your life without misrepresenting or offending others?

Our stories have to be told, what's so different about mine that doesn't also relate to you? There are universal emotions and experiences when you go to the core. The particular details and effects are different from person to person but the deeper essence is the same.
I have used poetic forms when working with painful issues. If you say it literally, it turns the audience off. If it is presented in an oblique way, alluded to, they can hear it and it can reach them.