Facing was a solo performance in which I animated a selection of embroidered dishcloths from my series Domestique.

At the end of the performance the audience were invited to wear T-shirts with punctuation marks printed on them; wearing an exclamation mark or a semi-colon, people stood next to each other and created emoticons together.

The two sections of the performance were connected by a monologue, in which I spoke of links between the invisible labour embodied by the used dishcloths and T-shirts.

Facing asked questions about how we relate to each other? What happens (as with the anonymity of sweatshop labourers) when a workers labour remains unseen, their face no longer present?

The performance happened at the Cornerhouse in Manchester in March 2012 in the context of ‘Between’, a season of new performance art commissions designed to take place in empty galleries between exhibitions. The project was curated by Louise Adkins and featured new performance works by Patricia Baga (USA), Annika Ström (SWE), Ruth Barker (UK) Helen Collett, Lois Macdonald (UK) and Louise Adkins (UK).

Photographs by Jonathan Purcell

Video by Matt Wand.

Related work: Domestique