GILDED BIRDS

Lily McMenamy, model and performance maker, on her copy of  The Testament of the Dead Daughter by Colette Thomas.

GB Tell me why you chose this.

LM I don’t have a lot of things that I hold onto. I’ve lived in so many different countries and different flats. When my mum moved house all my childhood stuff was gone and when my dad died all his stuff was gone. When I moved from New York so much got lost on the way. So, I don’t have many cherished objects. When I think about this book, it has been by my side for a really long time and I see it as a spiritual object somehow, more than a book.

GB So you couldn’t replace this one with another edition?

LM No, it definitely has to be this one. I don’t know exactly where I found it but it was one of those arty bookshops in Paris. I spent a lot of my time from the age of 18 traipsing around Paris in bookshops by myself. This copy was made by Cabinet gallery so it has a number for the edition on the back. It’s an English translation but I rewrote the French title on top. It has a bit of a Cy Twombly vibe now that it’s travelled with me so much. It’s also harking back to my teenage self where I’ve underlined it. It’s nice when you look back and the same things resonate. I was so young when I got it – there is even a Katie Melua quote I wrote in the margin!

 GB Tell me about the subject-matter. It’s quite a niche area of the french avant-garde.

LM I had no idea when I bought it. I just cracked it open and fell in love. I was an emotional girl feeling very connected to something. I had a book on the women of surrealism as a teenager so this really spoke to me. It really just speaks to my soul. I’m bad at reading novels because I don’t have the patience but this is so direct. She was an actress and I can relate to her writing and acting, to trying to figure out her relationship with God and femininity.

GB Do you think you find beauty in her pain?

LM I feel like me liking this book is also me coming out as an emo girl. I think if she existed today she’d such a girlblogger.

GB Do you think you could have been an ‘immortal young girl’ or a muse for a toothless old avant-garde artist like Antonin Artaud? 

LM Oh God, no. But I enjoy reading about the way she performed his work in a kind of trance.

GB Has that inspired the way you perform?

LM Yes, in a way. There’s also this book of poetry by Ariana Reines that has stayed by my side for a long time, A Sand Book. There’s a passage at the end where the sun penetrates her and speaks through her with these truisms. In my show, one of the characters is called the Eternal Muse. It’s a kind of reframing of the muse. I think there’s a devilish power in the muse that I’m interested in.

GB Is beauty a part of the show? You did all that modelling. Is the show more about unleashing what’s underneath?

LM That’s a very good way of describing it.

GB And yet your physical beauty is still there.

LM I’m aware of the way I might be perceived but I try to play with that and I try to go beyond it. But there’s always that outside eye that follows me. I don’t know if it’s from being a girl, being a model, being raised by a model, but if I had one wish it would be to get rid of that. If I had a superpower it would be to not feel the external gaze morphing me. I’d like to do a PhD in the malady of the seen woman.

GB You have to be incredibly brave to do a one-person show, don’t you?

LM I’m diagnosed with ADHD and the doctor said I have rejection sensitive dysphoria. That makes so much sense to me. I told my friend about it and how everything I do is about not being rejected and she pointed out how crazy it is that I’m doing this incredibly revealing one-person show. I’m reworking it at the moment to make it more honest, in the way that vulnerability is power. I’m literally wearing a wound and trying to go into that portal. It’s more empowering than dancing around it.

GB How did you come up with the wound costume?

LM I’ve been using that costume for a really long time. I was really into art history at school, in particular medieval art. They have these mandalas that I really like. People say it’s like a fanny but it’s just a shape that I like. It’s like an inverted superhero costume and we’re developing it now so it will go through this incredible transformation. I carry so much anxiety in that part of my chest that I wanted to make it an opening rather than a tightness, a kind of spillage. There’s a book called Animal Joy that’s about spilling the True Self out of a hole.

GB Do you think there’s anything that’s universally beautiful?

LM I think beauty is more like a moment of bliss between two things, before you’ve had a chance to think or reappropriate the moment, like when you’re walking by a canal in the sun, listening to music. Often you want to share it on Instagram and make it into some kind of a product and that kills it. For me it’s looking into my partner’s eyes. If I think about art it will be about the tiny details more than the whole. The thing about beauty is, it’s quite selfish, it’s about ‘this is a thing I’ve seen and I’m having a moment with.’ Terror is also a part of it, like opening  this book and feeling like it could be the answer to my life, feeling my heart swelling so I can’t handle it and I have to put it away.

GB What makes something worthy of the word Beauty to you?

LM Something to do with shining, with light or a spark. Ralph Waldo Emerson talks about looking at a work of art and it touches something in you that you weren’t fully cognisant of. It lights up a part of you that you knew was there but you weren’t in touch with it before. It’s having an unselfconscious spark, like rays of light.