My current practise utilises my former career as a professional wrestler and uses it as a departure point to create live art performances, actions and installations that explore, both aesthetically and thematically: deterioration, endurance, pain and violence. I started training at the age of 15 and started my own wrestling company with another wrestler in Devon in 2006, the East Devon Wrestling Federation. Since leaving the wrestling world (for a third time) in February 2009 due to multiple injuries, I have been using my experiences to interrogate the politics of blood and violence, deterioration of the male body and explicit homosocial behavioural patterns and performances within multiple sporting spheres. My current interest and area of research is concerned with the construction and performance of masculinity and how spectacles of pain and violence interact with gendered performances; particularly exhibited in professional wrestling. My work uses repetition and duration as strategies to interrogate the spectator’s capacity for complicity and creates charged spaces that incubate negotiated viewings of the male body and its behaviours.
