|
 Margaret Mayhew is an artist, academic, activist and performer with an interesting alter ego.
Among Margaret Mayhew’s identities are “Cunthead. Queer. A dandy. A dyke.” And she’s particularly fond of the latter. “I love that word, and feel like I’ve had to earn it,” she says. “Maybe that’s why I feel more ‘pride’ with saying ‘dyke’ rather than ‘bi’ even though I’ve had some fabulous moments with biocock.”
Born in Sydney, Mayhem as she’s known to many on the Sydney scene, spent her childhood in rural NSW before heading back to the big smoke and on to university, and study certainly seems to agree with her. The 37-year-old currently holds three degrees (in science, fine art and art history) and is near to completing her PhD in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Her dissertation is about “life drawing in relation to post-war art education, community art, popular culture and contemporary art”.
But she doesn’t just write about the process of life modelling. After art school Mayhem put herself on the other side of the canvas and worked as a life model herself, an experience she describes as a really great way to get in contact with her body, and to learn to really enjoy the possibilities of how she could express herself even while still and silent. “I didn’t go skinny dipping before I was 21 so spending four years of my life being naked for 30 hours a week was pretty amazing,” she says. “Probably what I valued most of all was meeting and working with other models, many of whom were are artists, students or performers and – most often – really intelligent thoughtful, creative and generous people.”
With all this nudity it’s hardly a surprise that the vagina has been a recurring motif throughout Mayhem’s creative life, including an incident at art school involving replica vulvas that got censored from the graduation catalogue, “a cunt dress I made for my BFA graduation ceremony, some other cunts sewed onto a tutu and a scary cunt mask for a masquerade party at the Mechanarky warehouse three years ago”.
Her muff-making materials include stuffed toys, fluff, silk, lace, leather, wire, velvet, glass, sequins and human hair for the pubes and as she is quick to point out, “You can never have too many vulvas.” Indeed!
Mayhem is a very familiar face at many an exhibition opening, both as artist and audience, and is a long-time supporter and advocate of the local art scene. She offers up a challenge to the art-loving public to put their money where their mouth is: “If you say you love art, then spend 10% of your income on buying it. Buy art from living artists, and buy art as presents, as well as for investment.” If this doesn’t suit, then make art, she urges. “Turn up to stuff, tell your friends about it, write about it, and think about quitting your job and becoming a boho ratbag!” As for her own artistic practice, this has included making installations, writing manifestos, doing performances, drawing, and “fauvist-style plen aire oil on canvas painting”.
Between fabricating cunts, writing and lecturing Mayhem does the odd spot of performing, often as a form of activism and social commentary. “I think art is that stuff that slides between different things and is meant to shake things up a bit, be that on an aesthetic, political or emotional level,” she muses. “Often this involves creating a new character, including Nanna Madge, a lovely mature lady most commonly seen in her bowling whites but prone to getting a bit bawdy after a couple of sherries, even winning a heat of the Newtown Hotel’s amateur strip competition last year.
Perhaps the most notable of her personas, however, is Schappylle Scragg, the Aussie icon who’s a fun-loving gal. “I really got into the masquerade aspect of it,” Mayhem says. “Transforming myself from this bespectacled bookish dyke into the bronzed Aussie bikini babe with big teeth, bleached pubes and a Bacardi-gut who espouses everything I hate: sport, shit beer and nationalism.” Schappylle heads the fake vigilante group CACA (Concerned Alert Citizens of Australia) and has been known to star in risqué photos for Slit, MC an art auction for the Greens and demonstrate at last year’s APEC protests.
As for what causes are closest to Mayhem’s heart, she says, “Where do I start? We’ve got a crazy society driven by insane greed, rapidly destroying a beautiful planet! I’m fundamentally concerned with working out ways to make imaginative spaces to create something different. Good art is life-affirming, generous and mind-expanding, and is inevitably linked with forms of social organisation that promote the same. Creativity involves moving beyond being a consumer or someone passive and having some sort of active relationship to our surroundings by imagining stuff that hasn’t existed and bringing it into the world.”
Mayhem by name, and nature, it seems.
Check out Mayhem’s blog at http://artandmayhem.blogspot.com
 |
Show/Hide comments
Show/Hide comment form
