Artist's statement:

LiveWire is about delightful horror. In evocative works in glass, resin, vinyl, digital prints and video, Celia de Villiers takes a look at the performed body as a site of subjection, agency and identity politics and investigates the manner in which contemporary artists challenge conformity through the use of cross-media and converging idiosyncrasies. Through her research of Performance art for the Masters in Fine Arts, De Villiers has investigated artworks that refer to physical adornment, masquerade and props as dialogues with self-disclosure and fetish. She has come to the conclusion that, over the last few decades, notions of traumatic spectacle and Gothic hybrid have been revived in artmaking and popular entertainment due to our preoccupation with the ab-human or post-human. Gothic and Baroque aesthetics seem to re-emerge cyclically during periods of cultural stress and mostly communicate anxieties about social transformations and crises.