Patricia, the Stripper

Ahem. As suspected I have not been as organised with this blog malarkey as I should have been so lots have happened and I haven't updated you about it. In fact, so much has happened that the show has been and gone and I'm only now getting to the point where I'm blogging about it.

As a reminder, a film of a stripper adding layers of clothing to illustrate how we hide parts of ourselves is where we've got to. Initially it seemed like a fairly straightforward task - find a stripper, pay a stripper, film a stripper putting their clothes on. But it wasn't really that straightforward.

First of all, what sort of stripper? You can have burlesque dancers and pole dancers and then there's the roly poly strippers people tend to use as a joke at stag parties. I was initially quite attracted to that approach, as I use a lot of humour in my work but the more I considered it, the more I felt uncomfortable with mocking women who were doing a job where they were already mocked plenty by the people who were paying them. After all, this artwork is based on the very honest and direct answers of a group of women I respect. I don't want to cheapen it in any way.

So I decided the best way to do this was to play it straight and to take a very honest, open, pared-back approach to the film I wanted to make.

But where do you find someone who can help you with that? I had no clue about where to start. However in the course of my research I came across this group of women who I felt represented the strong people I'd spoken to online and who I felt would take the work seriously. Step forward the East London Strippers' Collective, a kind of a strippers' union. http://ethicalstripper.com/site/

As a start point I decided it would be useful to go along to a life drawing class they ran on a Monday evening. The class begins with the dancer doing her routine, which, if you haven't been to a strip show before, can be a little discomfiting - especially when the dancer makes and maintains eye contact with you. That happened to me on the first night.

What I found fascinating is the highly codified approach to the whole process. There is a particular costume. It looks like little is being worn but in fact there are lots of layers. 2 pairs of pants, 2 bras, diaphanous layers upon layers. REALLY high heels that can be clacked together. As I took this all in it became apparent that I wouldn't need to get my stripper to put on normal street clothes for the effect I wanted. I could just get her to put the costume back on.

These dancers are incredibly athletic. They're basically hanging onto the pole by a couple of toes in some positions. There is great strength in what they do and very little vulnerability. It made me think I would want my dancer to work with a chair rather than a pole so that I can introduce an element of vulnerability.

We went through a series of 2 minute poses called 'strip freeze'. This was an incredible warm-up because you really need to get as much information on the page as you can in a very short period of time. I made some ink sketches and some pencil sketches which I tidied up after the class.