Poppy Jackson | SITE: A Decade On
This time 10 years ago (30-31 October 2015), I was sitting, unclothed, astride the apex roof of Artsadmin’s cafe at Toynbee Studios for eight hours, as part of SPILL Festival. The cold London air against my bare skin made for a resolute and intense form of presence. This in part referenced protest actions, yet was felt personally as a calm intensity and real aliveness. A side-effect of this deep internal durational stillness was its dissemination through the global press, tabloids and TV. This unexpected media storm vastly expanded my occupying of the space of the small hard concrete pitch into that of the world, resulting in global arts discourse, as well as hundreds of thousands of misogynist comments. In reflecting on the anniversary of this work with Artsadmin’s now Artistic Director, Raidene Carter, she asked me “how [do] you feel the context has or hasn’t changed 10 years on – has it? Do you feel it would draw a different response now?”
Actually, this kind of bodily intervention feels even more important now, at a time when our public space is dominated by flags signalling exclusion and hatred everywhere we go. And our basic right to protest even such horror as a genocide is being dismantled and enforced by an emboldened police force.
So, sadly the public realm is much more restrictive now in terms of bodily freedoms, autonomy, permissions, surveillance and division, leading to the threats of judgement and control right up to violence. There is a greater understanding of the body as a political and artistic site, but extreme polarisation in our cultural and digital landscape. We need the physical and real more now than ever, yet this is accompanied by far greater risk. The biggest change personally is that I am now a mother, bringing personal and artistic power and vulnerabilities that have vastly enriched my life and practice. However, these expose the tenfold judgements I am now subject to.
Lynn Garner wrote in the Guardian at the time, “She is a formidable figure, not to be messed with, gazing across the contemporary city as if protecting it. Perhaps from itself.” The Guardian took the online article down twice due to the deluge of misogynist comments underneath it that they then decided to block completely. The protection my maternal body has now come to signify in performances would speak differently on the paedophilic Western patriarchal gaze it would be viewed through. The cult of patriarchal dominance has unfortunately become forcibly internalised at alarming levels by us all. Art’s role is to critique and exorcise such conditioning.
The most ‘ideal’ white-supremacist capitalist commodity of all – the white female body – is being dehumanised and objectified with an extreme violence sped through the ‘collective consciousness’ of the internet. Simultaneously, trans and non-white bodies are currently being threatened by the nightmarish delusion of exclusion in the UK. SITE’s evolution was always mapped towards the opening out of the performance to a plurality of bodies and diverse identifications across a built landscape. Though, at this moment in 2025, the bodies who get to occupy space safely and visibly are even more specific and restricted than a decade ago, making the realisation of this work happen this time through body-cast sculpture, rather than live performance.
I went on to perform SITE as RITE/OBRED at great height upon the International Centre of Graphic Art in Ljubljana the following year from Artsadmin and SPILL, flying there the morning after my dad’s funeral. I’m not sure how I would have coped with the grief without this rite of elevated farewell to his ethereal soul up in the heavens. Arts Council England awarded performances – pregnant astride the roofs of historic churches – were unfortunately shut down with the pandemic. These works transformed into a project on the politics of the pregnant body, just as my right to home birth was removed. In June this year, I performed in conjunction with the domed architecture of the Borssele Nuclear Power Station in The Netherlands. This time I sat astride a Bourgeois spider-inspired sculpture, through which to view and mirror the nuclear dome. I became the ‘mother-birther’ of 6 coachloads of audience-members as they walked through the structure right underneath me, amongst the industrial might around us as we weathered an unexpected storm on the North Sea Port. SITE still is, for me, a culmination and distilling of my entire practice and I will always take it to as many places as possible, aiming hopefully well into my nineties!
About the artist
Poppy Jackson makes work exploring the female body as an autonomous zone. Her practice spans painting, printmaking, sculpture and live performance. Public space and architecture in relation to the body are key themes in her work. Motherhood has activated a focus on the politics of the maternal body within the rural Suffolk landscape in which she lives with her two young daughters. Jackson is an Associate Artist of ]performance s p a c e [.