Helena Goldwater
Hot Soak Friday 22 September

Helena Goldwater has indulged in a room with a view at the Queen’s Hotel. She invites you to spend five minutes alone with her in the bathroom. Hot Soak is a ‘one-to-one’ performance which revels in fluids and intimacy. Without you - the audience - this work could not exist.

The lavish comfort of a room at the Queen’s Hotel, with an outstanding view over the seascape, is the setting for Hot Soak. In such resonant hostelry, another magnificent watery image awaits audience members as they spend five minutes in the bathroom alone with the artist. A place of cleansing and, usually, privacy, Goldwater shares an unusual moment of bathing. The meeting of, and exchange between, artist and audience is peculiarly charged in such familiar yet impersonal circumstances. A gently confronting work, which positions itself between the erotic, the grotesque and the humorous.

There is limited capacity for this performance so please book a place to avoid disappointment. Your participation whilst at close quarters does not require you to be afraid or nervous.

Biography:
Helena Goldwater has been engaged in a performance art practice since graduating from Goldsmith’s Fine Art in 1989, and since 2003 has also been making paintings - some of which were exhibited at Newlyn Art Gallery last year in the show Lost and Found in Translation. Characteristically, her performances have featured her immersion in, or an outpouring of, fluids, focusing on details of the body to explore the transformation of identity and sexuality through uncertainty. Her recent work specifically engages in intimacy in order to question and transgress accepted performance boundaries.
Her work has been shown extensively, both nationally and internationally. Most recently her performance images, made with Manuel Vason, which were included in the book Exposures and Art, Lies and Videotape: Exposing Performance, Tate Liverpool (2003), are currently part of a touring exhibition; she has performed for the live art space ‘home’, London, (2001 and 2005), as well as Spit for Rational Rec, a night of performance curated by Ansuman Biswas, at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, London (2006); presented a sound piece in the group exhibition, Le Cheveu, in Montréal, Canada (2003); and exhibited her paintings in Hortus, for Spacex Gallery, Exeter/Liverpool Biennial (2004).