Cleansing #4.1-2 is the fourth iteration of a participatory performance that completes the installation Peeling. Audience is invited to confess to the artist, who will listen with complete silence and offer her hair that becomes skin. The ‘skin’ is a new materiality  bred from intimate acts of participant confessions to the artist. Wet, draped, hung and stretched, the new skin created with participants will evolve in the space, changing according to their climate, mirroring the healing journey of each wound. It embodies the poetic act of peeling as an attempt to remove collective trauma from bodies. This poignantly liberating yet painfully commanding force mediates into the public space to visualise a survival of trauma in an attempt to remake the future.
This project is supported by the NSW government through Create NSW.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Natalie Quanyau Tso (左君悠) is a Hong Kong-Australian emerging artist based on Cammeraygal and Gadigal lands. Her practice activates intimate materials including hair, salt and a new materiality she created called ‘skins’ – often performing with them and producing sculptures from their residues. Tso engages in performative acts of cleansing, hair-cutting and peeling to reclaim cleansing from the warfare of cultural erasure and assimilation, both in Hong Kong and Australia. Hinged upon a precarious balance between love and fear, remembering and forgetting, survival and grief, her practice aims to reshape intimate and political relationships by mediating internalised pain within a public space.
Natalie has completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours: First Class) at UNSW Art & Design. Since 2016 she has exhibited throughout Australia in both solo and group shows.