‘Empress Stah in Space’ was conceived in 2006 upon the discovery of the pioneering work by the Arts Catalyst aboard parabolic zero gravity flights. Emboldened by the improbability, Empress Stah set her sights as far as they could reach and embarked on an artistic journey to make a performance in outer space.
The journey shares its name with a solo show commissioned by the Pacitti Company for the SPILL Festival of Performance and funded by the Arts Council England, in 2011, the same year that Empress Stah first experienced weightlessness aboard a parabolic flight with the Zero Gravity Corporation.
Set at the edge of chaos, the shows non-linear narrative was transcribed through trance and writing sessions between Empress Stah and the shows director, seminal body artist Ron Athey, which took place at the disused RAF Bentwaters in Suffolk, the site of the biggest, purported, UFO/Military incident in Europe.
‘Stargasm’ is an aerial circus act performed with laser beams emitting from Empress Stah’s uranus. The conception and invention of the laser butt plug can be traced directly to a failed funding application to the Wellcome Trust to charter a zero gravity fight with the Russian Space Agency and make a 3D film of Empress Stah and cult rock star Peaches, floating and crashing around inside the plane.
Peaches went on to write the track ‘Light in Places’ for Empress Stah’s ‘Stargasm’, upon being given the words Iconoclasm and Stargasm, which had beamed down via Ron Athey at Bentwaters on the day we spent channelling the unknowable mysteries.
Empress Stah is a genre defying performance artist who fuses sublime aerial artistry with provocative and thought provoking performances.
Space Feminisms makes a radical enquiry into how earthly power structures are already expanding into our skies, facilitating a collaborative and interdisciplinary platform for scholars, artists, and designers to imagine radical constructions of human futures beyond Earth. At the intersection of scientific, cultural, social, and artistic speculations, the book gathers leading scholars, scientists, artists, and designers to develop innovative tactics and disruptive participations to create generative, alternative, and radical futures of and in space.
Edited by Space Arts Luminaries Marie-Pier Boucher, Annick Bureaud, Claire Webb & Nahum All.
Photo by Manuel Vason for my solo show, Empress Stah in Space.
In 2008 I launched an art project to make a performance in Outta Space.
View the link Space Mission to see the projects that have been created as part of my pilgrimage to the stars.
Published by Bloomsbury Press in 2024.
Photo by Clive Holland