...I see the performance, “All of Us Girls Have Been Dead for so Long” as one instance or incarnation of the “Sister O” permutations...Nancy was able to focus and hone down her vast underwater database, her diverse array of media, her omnivorous appetites, and present a tight, beautiful, contradictory and moving piece.
I first encountered Nancy and her work in 2002, as a guest lecturer at DasArts during Shu Lea Cheang’s block 16, “Human Material Machine Factor”. I was intrigued then by Nancy’s wide roaming and strangely resonating concepts. Being involved with digital arts in my own practice, I was also of course, very much interested in her performative uses of computer technology, sensors, and telepresence in coherant formation with her wild girl punk + 1920s bohemian aesthetic.
Seeing her bury the working parts of a dataglove sensor in a bloody animal heart then “reprogramme it, to spirallic lines of force” with a stick, made my heart glad. Here was someone not in awe of the technology, but joyfully and seriously involved with it in giving form to her own stories.
In Nancy’s work I see a generative, energetic collision of technology, riot grrl rock, dance, punk, myth, feminism, vaudeville and the concerns of the psyche. Her work weaves together transcendent practices of many kinds while feeding from the rot and beauty of contemporary daily life...
we talked database software, websites, Keyworx, gutter dancing, porthole dancing, glitches, broadcast frequencies and more. Nancy wrote and sent to me various drafts of her “Tracks” - remarkable writings around which her work was to be based. I will add here, that I believe her writing is very important to her practice. It strikes me as visionary in nature. It reminds me of early work by Francesca da Rimini (alias GashGirl) which has a similar electrifying yet opiate ability to take your breath away while floating you above the ordinary, still keeping the ordinary in grasp....
I have the sense that Nancy has taken in to herself works by poets and artists, charlatans and rock gods who have preceded her, that she has considered, digested, reshuffled and inverted them and builds her own work on that foundation. I feel that she has a medium’s ability to pick up the threads and vibrations from this momentous pile as well as from the air around her, pull them in, articulate them and weave them together in new combinations.
...notes reproduced from mentor Linda Dement.