This project began as a lived experiment, with an admittedly optimistic thesis. I thought that, through taking control of the method through which my image was consumed, I’d be able to renegotiate my relationship with feminine performance. I know that I’m a performative person, and I know that I’m performing to a system of masculine power.

What emerged over the time was not quite this, however. Over the summer, I felt more constricted than ever. The constant desire to perform some ‘true’ sense of self to the cameras of my investigator was bound by my every day performance - to the men in my life, to the people who grant access to my career, to every stray glance on the street. The excessive conscientiousness of spectatorship and performance became destabilising.

But the private investigator, Ryan, granted me an unexpected power. Everybody wanted to be captured by his gaze, to be included in his documentation. Ryan’s presence - real or not - provided me both cultural capital and a sense of control in social dynamics.

Across the time two-month long period I wrote diary entries every day in the form of letters to my investigator, Ryan. These diary entries are now being reworked into a book.

Hello, Ryan.

I woke up sad today. I’m glad that you’re here, because you’re the only reason I got out of bed.

Instead of spending the day sweating amongst my sheets with only blue light from my phone to punctuate the dark, I’ve opened the curtains. It’s early afternoon and the sun is beating so hard through the windows that the whole room is throbbing with heat.

As I write to you now, I’m sat on my windowsill, chain-smoking cigarettes even though my chest really hurts because I’ve been chain smoking since I was thirteen. I look beautiful, in my baby pink negligee with my expensive new hair cut that I paid for because a man said he was going to give me £10,000. My legs are dangling out of the third story window, just above eye level, with my arm loosely wrapped around the windowpane, so I don’t fall and die.

There’s decaying fruit on my bedroom floor with tiny little flies making their home in it. I like to think about how I look to them; this blurred giant through fractal eyes, moving in slow motion to disrupt their peace. I look beautiful though. You already know all of this.

17.46pm

I’m on my way to a date with a very old man in a very posh hotel in West London. I’m exhausted. I’ve always been good at slipping into whatever identity a given situation asks of me, always had a talent for quick acclimatization. Perhaps this slippery nature of mine is my identity, the only fixed thing about me being my ability to remain unfixed.

20.18pm

Hey Ryan, I’m wondering if you saw me snog the balding man outside of Charlotte Street Hotel? He has a lazy eye, but he mines diamonds. We won’t see him again.

All content on this page was taken by my private investigator