Artist Focus: Louise Orwin

This show is about you rating me based solely on my looks…

Who is Louise Orwin?

Louise Orwin is a live artist, researcher, writer and performer. Her work is both live and recorded, with incarnations in performance, video and photography. She is fascinated by liveness, awkwardness, femininity and masochism – but above all, she likes to have fun.

Louise has shown work internationally and all over the UK. She is preoccupied with a doomed sense of femininity which she feels imposes cultural limitations on her self and her work. She enjoys playing with these perceived limitations and stereotypical notions of the feminine in popular culture.

Her practice fuses the horrifyingly intimate with the excruciatingly public, often engaging its audiences in demanding, exciting and risk-taking positions: always asking not only what the audience may take from the performance, but what the performance may take from its audiences. By mixing the highly theatrical with the perfectly mundane, her work strives to challenge what we may conceive of as entertaining in a fast-moving and media-saturated world.

Louise’s works include A Girl and A Gun – a live performance work challenging our fascination with gendered violence on screen, which featured at Camden’s Calm Down Dear Festival of feminism and is due to visit Amsterdam later this year – Humiliation Piece which saw the artist put her fate in the hands of her audience as she struggled through a game of Truth or Dare controlled and judged by the viewers, and The Betty Series – a continuing performative photographic series exploring female iconography and an obsessive connection with food.

What is Louise Bringing to Frequency?

Pretty Ugly focuses on the recent global trend of young girls posting videos on YouTube asking viewers to rate their looks. Louise Orwin tried this for herself, living as three teenage alter-egos online. This installation, performance and workshop explores what happened. There is a live YouTube experiment, some Britney, a tender and inappropriate love story and some of Louise’s childhood toys. The piece is about our obsessions and pretensions and teenage girls. It’s also about you, me and the internet.

Pretty Ugly has received international media attention, being featured in New York Magazine, Wired, The Independent and on Woman’s Hour. It received its full London premiere at Camden’s People’s Theatre as the headlining act for the very first Calm Down, Dear Festival of Feminism in October 2013.