[Please feel free to scroll down
​for a full list of works and projects.]
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​I make live art and performance from the position of an infiltrated outsider: foreign, but able to 'pass'; ethnically white, but culturally 'other'; pushing against heteronormativity with my Queerness, but identifying as a gay man; and positioned somewhere between the fringes of academia and the art scene. Hybridity, otherness, and juxtaposition are cornerstones to my work, which brings together different ideas, mediums and vocabularies in unexpected combinations.
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​My practice is process-led and highly context-sensitive, often responding to a specific time or place. I aspire to capture the zeitgeist, seeking to engage with current moods or discourses, and emphasise the unique nature of the live moment. Whilst my work is socially engaged, it rejects the notion of a single 'message'. Instead, I tackle loaded and complex subjects in ways that playfully straddle the solemn and the carnivalesque, the apotheotic and the derisive, the holy and the profane, genuine emotion and irreverent irony. I seek to embrace multiplicity, raising questions rather than making pronouncements, and fostering the subjectivity of each spectator or participant by inviting them to find other ways of seeing, understanding, and feeling.
I stand by the conviction that performance and live art can really do something (not just in the practical sense of doing something, but also becaue they have the power to affect change).
       I believe the eloquence of their actions can go beyond rational thought; that their porous and refractive qualities are open and accessible to broad and diveres audience; that they generates shared experiences which are visceral, conceptual, and emotional; that they can open up a charged space for both contemplation and action, within which transformative powers can be conjured for the audience and the doer.
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I have both a penchant for the Baroque and the Japanese aesthetic concept of 'wabi sabi'; finding beauty in the exuberantly ornate, the broken, and the incomplete. The striking contemporary nature of my aesthetic and its sometimes camp sensibility has been likened to that of Derek Jarman. An old friend once said I like art that “shows the flaw in humanity”, and it is true that vulnerability and fragility have a way of working their way into my work. My long-standing collaborator Daisy Orton once told me I like performances like I like my sandwiches: strong flavours, many textures and layers, with lashings of condiments. Yes, I like to get my hands dirty.

I take musico-visual approaches to composition, so that carefully arranged visual and aural elements are frequently structural anchoring points in my work. And yet, I often find myself building unrehearsable moments into my performances. This tension between the carefully arranged, and the messy or accidental is a recurring aesthetic motif in my work. 

Although I'm not a trained musician and don't play any conventional instruments, I pay particular attention to the notion of musicality. Whilst some pieces follow a deliberately musical structure, all my work has a musical sensibility. In particular, I al interested in exploring the dramaturgy of lists and the power of repetition to open up meditative spaces.

Using totemic objects and materials, I am particularly drawn to materiality and its visceral power. Not only can it reveal the body as an ever-mutating site upon which larger forces act, but it can offer way to go beyond discursive language. And yet, language and word-play, often in the shape of incantatory lists or litanies, are a recurring feature in my work.
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If I am drawn to performance or live art as a medium, it's due to its inherent liveness, the opportunities it offers for exchange, and the ways it can serve as a vehicle to interrogate and trouble meaning-making processes. My work feels most at home situated in the here-and-now. Flirting with risk, it dances on the knife-edge between the planned and the spontaneous, between me as an artist and the audience, between structure and chaos, between what is there in the work and what the audience bring to it. My work aspires to a level of high porosity, leaving plenty of room and ways in for the audience, so that their engagement is fundamentally necessary for the work's completion.

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In 2005 I founded Accidental Collective with Daisy Orton. For over ten years we devised performances using bricolage approaches, subverting familiar frameworks and having a responsive relationship to sites, contexts, and audiences. Our aesthetics leant towards the hand crafted and the lo-fi, and our work was generous and often participatory. You can read about our practice here, and view our past work here.
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WORKS & PROJECTS

ALL WITHIN A COLLAPSING BUILDING:
​a septet for the apocalypse

BARLOVENTO y SOTAVENTO
(un réquiem refugiado)

20x20 (una de cal x una de arena)

ANGELUS: angels de Beers

YES NO BLACK WHITE

Bride of Brexit
"It's a pleasure working with Pablo. He throws himself into the work, does research,
and performs with dedication, intensity, and a gusto for the creative process."
Richard Schechner, East Coast Artists Director

"An intimate artist with a powerful stage presence,
Pablo left a very large audience feeling exhilarated and politically mobilised."
Diana Georgiou, Co-director at CUNTemporary

"Pablo epitomises the reasons I curate Live Art. Energetic and inventive, he's proved on more than one occasion to be extremely professional and capable of dealing with challenging situations and sensitive topics with wit, precision, care and creativity."
Giulia Casalini
Founder and curator at Archivio Queer Italia
/ Teoremi Performance Festival / Deep Trash


​OTHER PROJECTS

The Speed of Reason Produces Warning Hallucin-AI-tions

S.o.S.S. (Sisyphus on Salisbury Sands)

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​COLLABORATIONS​



​Here are some slides about my practice which were part of a lecture I delivered in 2015 for second-year students on a performance art course at the University of Kent.

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