“I’m trying to remove the structure of being watched.” In Conversation with Performance Artist Lula Braimbridge
A recent graduate set to stage performances at Stockport Garrick Theatre in July, Manchester-based queer performance artist Lula Braimbridge talks to Anna Marsden about embracing nudity, discomfort and the gaze…
Usually, when it comes to female performance art there are two involved parties: the watcher and the watched. As the performer places themselves in a position to be observed, the people stare back. But who is in control? Where does the power lie, how will the dynamic play out? I imagine it as a kind of see-saw; eternally unbalanced, constantly teetering, forever destined to rise and fall, an everlasting lack of equilibrium. I am fascinated by what it is to be watched, what it is to put oneself in a position to be seen.
In my quest to dissect these see-saws of mine, I have an insightful conversation with Manchester-based queer performance artist Lula Braimbridge. She is somewhere in Somerset distracted by robins; I can sometimes hear a piano in the background. “I think a lot about breaking the spectacle of being watched, it’s kind of like on-going research”, she begins.
Graduating from Fine Art at Manchester Metropolitan University last year, and a MADE IT 2024 exhibiting artist, Braimbridge’s practice combines sculpture with her naked form to transcend and reclaim discomfort. “It was this thing of ‘I’m naked, I’m vulnerable and uncomfortable but I’m confronting that and sitting with it and holding it’.” In a performance at Pink Manchester in Stockport earlier this year, a naked Lula rocked backwards and forwards, held and supported by a glinting, silver crescent, watched on by a crowd. It is this structure of being watched that Lula is attempting to remove within her work. “We all are in a sense watching and observing each other [in everyday life]. I aim to change the performer-audience relationship to invite us to exist as equals in a shared space rather than as a spectacle and spectator”.
As a woman with herself on display to be watched at will, where does this situate her practice? Her work is not intended as a feminist statement nor is it a play on power dynamics, but rather “an exploration into humanness” at its most elementary. “What is it for you to feel uncomfortable to look at me?”, she wonders. Her nakedness is a return to this notion of simply being a body, Lula is not “shocking for the sake of shocking.”
It is tricky to the point of impossibility for her to “perform something without necessarily having objectification involved”, especially with male onlookers who are hyperaware and, perhaps, uncomfortable with their feelings on the naked, female form. Lula is sitting with this discomfort and her lack of control in an endeavour to unpick the male gaze. She cannot possibly control the gaze of any one individual, so it seems her focus instead is on the balance of equals and how this becomes a coping mechanism to the patriarchy as a structure.
It will really stick with me; her ideas of humanness and bodies, that sometimes it is as simple as taking care of one another’s vessels in “this world that is sort of born out of not taking care of us. How do we allow ourselves to just be… Us?” She wonders aloud a lot in our conversation, framing questions with answers she hasn’t quite figured out yet but, sometimes not knowing is enough. As we bring our conversation to an end however, she asks herself a question that she does have an answer to. How do you find the balance between audience and performer? She pauses, considers. Then, decidedly, “I am moving through this with gentleness and softness.”
Anna Marsden
See Braimbridge at upcoming collaborative performances with artists Martha Barr, Jamie Moran and Madeleine Vietmeier – where audience members are invited to draw, write, think, or just sit still. Thursday 10, Wednesday 16 and Tuesday 22 July 2025, with Brut Life Drawing at Stockport Garrick Theatre, Wellington Road South, Stockport SK3 0EJ – £14-16 tickets on Everntbrite
Call-out for ‘curious wanderers and adventurers’ – interested in going on walks with Braimbridge? Contact the artist through Instagram: @lula_bluee
