Mary, Mistaken Outcast. Artificial hair, wire, ribbon, high heels. Performance documentation at Covehithe ruins, Suffolk, UK. 2019.
Mary, Mistaken Outcast. Artificial hair, wire, ribbon, high heels. Performance documentation at St. Mary’s Rest Garden, Nottingham, UK. Performed for UKYA City Takeover: Nottingham 2019. Photographed by Reece Straw. 2019.
Mary, Mistaken Outcast. Artificial hair, ribbon, high heels. Performance documentation at St. Margaret’s Church, Cley next the Sea, UK. Performed for Cley 19: Borderlines, curated by Dyad Creative. 2019.
Haley Craw
Mary, Mistaken Outcast is a performative encounter with a wild woman, an embodied fiction. The performance took place in three locations in England, initially in the Covehithe ruins in Suffolk, then St. Mary’s Rest Garden in Nottingham, and finally at St. Margaret’s church in Cley next the Sea. In my practice I create a personal mythology, inspired by history and folklore, with a focus on the empowering nature of transformation. In regards to mental health, I find resilience by rewriting the narratives I tell myself when I become overwhelmed by feelings of anxiety and depression. I try to notice what is true and what is fiction, and how my sense of self is malleable. In this way I find myth making empowering, it is a chance to take control of your identity, and become more at ease with the idea that change is constant and profoundly liberating. My work explores shifting forms of self-portraiture, and the notion that there is no fixed self. By giving form to these fictions I feel a fuller sense of self, a reflection of the beautiful complexity that is our individual psychology and mental health.
Haley Craw is a Canadian artist based in Norwich, UK. She received her BFA from the Alberta University of the Arts in 2017. Craw uses various forms of self-portraiture to express her central focus: transformation. She creates a shifting psychological landscape, a peek into the fictions we create about ourselves and the world around us, and how these stories are entirely unstable. Craw has exhibited work in UKYA City Takeover: Nottingham (2019), Cley 19: Borderlines in Cley next the Sea (2019), the Illingworth Kerr Gallery in Calgary (2018), as well as been featured on the BBC.