If you don't know... Paula Varjack
… let me introduce you!
Paula Varjack is an artist working across performance, video, participation, spoken word, and sometimes all of these areas at once. During the past six years she has created performances, installations, sound and video pieces, utilising training from performance making, technical theatre and filmmaking. She makes work as a way of making sense of, and communicating with the world. She likes to amplify marginalised stories and voices, engaging in a way that both provokes thought and entertains. Having begun her practice as a solo artist, her work has become increasingly collaborative, shaped by the artists who inspire and collaborate with her.
Central to the art she makes is a question she is preoccupied with, that she explores through the creation of the work . These tend to be societal questions. Previously she has tackled: how social media impacts loss; how it is possible to financially survive as an artist; how and why we are drawn to buy the things that we want; and most recently: what it means to be an adult childless/childfree woman, in a society that conflates maturity as a woman, with motherhood. She is currently developing I, Melania with filmmaker Chuck Blue Lowry, exploring their dual heritage and what it means to be foreign.
Her performance and research project “Show Me The Money” – explored making a living as an artist in the U.K., based on interviews with 44 artists across the country, now continues as an ongoing blog on art and money.
Over lockdown she redeveloped her mailing list into a cultural digest of what she is watching, listening to and reading, alongside digital art experiments. Read past issues here, and subscribe here.
Last month she was Artist in Residence at Queer Circle. Explore here for interviews conducted by Paula, articles about her current and former work, and lot’s more, including this terrific conversation between Paula and fellow artist, Louise Orwin.
She is a Barbican Open Lab Artist, London Pleasance Associate artist and has had work commissioned by The Barbican, Battersea Arts Centre, Camden People's Theatre, Fuel, Apples & Snakes, The Marlborough, and Attenborough Centre for the Arts. Born in Washington D.C. to a Ghanaian mother and a British father, out of many places she has lived she considers east London to be "home".
Purchase Paula’s limited edition print Coming out to my father here and her award winning debut collection of prose & poetry, Letters I Never Sent You, here.
Support Paula’s work via Patreon here.
Follow her on Twitter & Instagram
You can also check out a quick round up of Paula’s current activity on her Linktree.
She also collaborates on a comic with graphic designer Ben Gregory. You can follow it here.