PARIS- SPLIT SHOW / KZENYA OUTENDOT

Paris was my revenge.

In this instance. St. Martins college refused to let me do the student exchange year in the Accademie  des Beaux Artes in Paris, which was my plan. Instead, with the rest of the students, I had to think up "an exterior project"- Any way of putting my art out side of college.
A frieind printed her work in black and  white on  A4 paper and glued it to lamp posts in London around college. I went to Paris, convinced the manager of an alternative gallery  space on Rue Rivoli to give me a show.
 It was my revenge to the S.t Martins tutors. That was to be my first solo show in a gallery space. The first taste of being an artist, in the world, outside college. But more importantly , I started a collaboration with Kzeniya.

We planed a perfomance and had for the occasion invented the most complex, genius , paper stage, and audience holding apparatus, which held the heads of our viewers in place one by one, very uncomfortably close to one another, and by the end of the performance the stage was ripped and disintegrated, thrown out of the windows, to create once space with the audience and the performers mixed in together to become the protagonists.  It had never been seen before or since. We where a hit, in the Paris art events that month.

Getting to the show was hilarious, after we got of the London train, the painting could not fit into any taxi in Paris other than a type of limousine.

Kzeniya brought Marina K. to Paris with us to assist us, and I just could not understand than that this girl was coming becosue " she loves Paris so much she just needs an exscuse to go, any excuse".

We had lots of adventures that weekend. Having been very organised Kzeniya booked her hotel, via the internet, form London, and it turned out to be- who the hell knows where , and far from our show. She even got lost having taken a walk out of the hotel one evening, and had a very surreal expirence with a man called Angel, who spoke Russian her mother tongue,  and who helped her find her hotel in the middle of the night, and dissapered afterwards.



Kzenya and I met at the international students day at St .Martins college. She was fresh from Ukraine, and I somehow ended up there even tough I had been living in England for 8 years.  I yearned for international after living in a very English only, small village all those years.

We both ended up studying design for performance at the end of the foundation year at St. Martins, but the next year I retuned to my Fine Art roots and she remained in theatre. I don't know how we ended up woring on this project, I suppose we just wanted to do something together.
And than we had Paris.

What is funny is that  Kzeniya  more than a decade later, Kzeniya has just moved to live in Paris with her family!

She had no idea of that than..