Nudibranch (2022-current)

What might it be like to be a nudibranch — one of many bizarre otherworldly sea slugs that you can find pretty much in all the oceans of the world? Sightless, diverse in shape and colour, hermaphroditic, some cannibalistic, shell-less yet with strange toxic defenses, the nudibranch is a formidable archetypal collaborator and an inexhaustible source of inspiration.

In wondering about nudibranchs, I am driven by a deep desire to expand my ecology and to develop an appreciation of the difference that marks life on this planet. Yet I keep hitting my head against the wall of my own humanness which appears as mothering/feeding, sensuality/sexuality, womanhood and anticolonial revenge tales… I dive to spend time with nudibranchs in Bodrum and my flippers stir the already-moving waters, rendering the slug’s grip on the sunken boat’s mast even more precarious. Perhaps I should just stop looking, lest I risk harming them even more.

How do I not reduce the nudibranch to an image? How do I not reduce images to my all-too-human perceptions which already reflect my particular conditions? Can we ever meet?

So far this project has taken the form of different collaborations leading to multiple different R&D performances, over four residencies at Space Clarence Mews, in collaboration with my daughter and later with artists who use fabric and sound as their mediums to create embodied responses to scientific texts about the nudibranch and to share performative underwater worlds with audiences. Working with wearable objects with unique sensualities – texture, colour, shape, weight and extension – and exploring how music, song, and other audio materials including my voice can generate felt spaces and touch through vibration, I found my performer-self changing: slowing down, attending to the sensorial, finding much more stillness or subtlety than I am used to.

Above are some pictures from the very start of the project: a collaborative week-long residency with Mercan, my then-eight-year-old daughter, which culminated in an interactive installation including a short performance. Parts of the process was documented by Alev Erdoğan, August 2022, who collected what she witnessed in a short documentary:

Mercan and I found a fascination with nudibranchs’ relationship with food – they often live on what they eat. Our relationality in the studio unwittingly mimicked this as we alternated ‘acting out’ being organism and habitat as parent and child and lead artist and unpredictable collaborator. I was reminded of the felt experience of breastfeeding and discovered I was still at once nourishment and containment, long past infancy.

In the meantime, something about my own sensuality, sexuality, ageing post-maternal pre-menopausal body was activated in me, partly in response to Irenosen Okojie’s short story Nudibranch which tells the postcolonial revenge tale of a heart-eating sea goddess. My engagement with this text alongside scientific books on sea slugs led to a solo in-progress performance documented by Scott Robinson.

Later in a workshop at the Performance as Research working group at the IFTR conference in Accra, Ghana, I began to explore the striking visuals of nudibranchs alongside their tactility and movement in relation to their habitats, propelled by currents sometimes or sliding on their mucus trails. Many messy encounters with putty, clay and slime were facilitated as well as invitations to slow down and look at photographs of these bizarre animals – activating touch in performance and spectatorship.

The turn towards looking for the sensory world of nudibranchs led to collaborations with costume artist Berthe Fortin and sound artist Patrick Furness. We first held an improvised encounter / open studio event, February 2024. Photos and a short video below.

Finally, in August 2024, I went scuba diving after ten years and spent half an hour with six flabbelina pedata precariously clinging on to the hydroids growing on a wrecked boat. Out of these encounters, a figure that is neither me nor a theatrical representation of the nudibranch emerged: Naked Gills. Naked Gills is a hybrid-cross-species-drag-act-migrant-cabaret persona and series of performance poems that bring together movement, costume, sound, site, video, extended voice, song, and collaborative worldbuilding. Below is a short extract of the most recent iteration of Naked Gills, including sections of experimental material from my latest R&D sharing at Space Clarence Mews, in January 2026, where I invited a group of collaborators to ‘a reverie of nudibranchs’, to collectively explore selections of text, movement and song in a semi-structured event.