Louise Orwin
Louise is a London-based artist-researcher. Her work spans the live and the recorded with incarnations in performance, video and photography. She is preoccupied with liveness, awkwardness, femininity and masochism, but above all she likes to have fun. Her practice fuses the horrifyingly intimate with the excruciatingly public, 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.
She has shown work all over the UK and internationally, at some of the most prominent and exciting venues and festivals, and has been written about in international press from The Guardian, to the New York Times.
PRETTY UGLY
In 2013, artist-researcher Louise Orwin came across a shocking trend whereby young girls (aged between 8 and 16) were posting videos of themselves on YouTube asking viewers to tell them whether they were 'pretty' or 'ugly'.Deciding she needed to know why the girls were doing this and what it might feel like to ‘put herself out there’, she created three teenage alter egos, posted her own 'pretty/ugly' videos on YouTube and waited for the results.
Pretty Ugly attempts to bring you into the world Louise lived in in 2013. It charts the ups and downs of the research, crunches some nasty statistics about YouTube users and cyberbullies, and struggles with its own moral and ethical stance. It asks how social media is changing you and me, and what this means for feminism today.
There's some rollerskating, some lipsynching to Britney, some of her childhood toys and some dubious apologies. It is about our obsessions and pretensions, and teenage girls- but don’t let that put you off. It is about you, and me, and the internet.
UKYA PROJECTS:
National Biennale: Derby 2016