This early piece generated what eventually became a 13‑year project. At the time, the messiness and liveliness of the work were not written about, theorised, or even fully understood by me. I was critisised as 'not being ready to show' , 'unresolved', but deep down there was something in its raw emergence that never left me. It took over a decade before I found the language for what I was doing—language that only arrived after encountering Phelan, Moten, and others who articulate the politics of disappearance, fugitivity, and the ungovernable qualities of live art. Looking back, I now recognise that this was an early iteration of my methodology, shown only to a few people at the university of Worcester, but already carrying the seeds of the practice I would later develop.

The work demonstrated a progression—a pedagogical transfer of knowledge that happened through the making itself. It was not rehearsed, not “polished” in the Eurocentric sense of refinement, finish, or neutrality. Instead, it was emergent, relational, and resistant to the sanitising expectations of the white cube.

In the piece, the socially‑deemed “white girl” disappears into the gallery wall. She disrupts the wall by removing a section of it and placing it on the floor. She soaks her face in white paint, splashes it across her skin, and in doing so dissolves into the architecture that is meant to contain her. The act is both a vanishing and a refusal—a way of showing how bodies are absorbed, erased, or disciplined by institutional spaces, while simultaneously asserting a form of agency through disruption.

Only now can I see that this early work was already articulating the tensions that continue to shape my practice: the politics of visibility and disappearance, the refusal of Eurocentric polish, and the insistence on live, embodied knowledge as a legitimate and necessary mode of artistic production.

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Emma Starkey

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