Rosa Garland’s new show is coming to this year’s Edinburgh Fringe
BY ROSA GARLAND, IMAGE BY CORINNE CUMMING
Ever kind of wanted to kiss a worm? Just to see what it feels like? Like a fly hovering around poo, I am artistically obsessed with the intersection of the erotic and the grotesque.
Growing up, I had a strange, deep feeling of wrongness about myself and my ability to be sexual. I felt that the world of relationships and sex was not for me, and I had my nose pressed up against the glass, fogging it up, watching everyone else fucking in perfect rhythm and harmony. Call it growing up in a sex-negative society; call it compulsory heterosexuality; call it trauma.
Of course, this fantasy turned out to be entirely true. Everyone else in the world was super sexually confident and explorative, and I was the dirty idiot on the margins.
Just kidding.
I wasn’t alone in feeling this way, but “dirty idiot on the margins” still fairly accurately characterises the way mainstream culture sees hairy, angry lesbians. So… why not embrace that?
Flash forward to today: I’m preparing to take my second sex-clown show to Edinburgh Fringe, spending my days making buckets of bright orange goo and paying frequent visits to South London Angling & Fireworks (AKA the worm shop).
Primal Bog is a new solo clown/live art mash-up about the obstacles many of us have to face to even start considering our own desire and pleasure. The journey can be long and strange, like entering an unknown bog, and often the most exciting breakthroughs don’t come from the places we’d expect. Perhaps our desires seem socially counter-intuitive (like masochism), or the parts of ourselves that scare us most are the ones to unlock new doors.
Pleasure, and even queer pleasure and identity, have become commodified and are getting sold back to us as corporate diversity, candles and dodgy wellness empires. Even as the fundamental rights of many in our community are being eroded, Pride remains, in many cities, a corporate event. To me, queer sexual pleasure isn’t anything particularly clean or aesthetically pleasing. Right now, it’s five buckets of orange gunge.
I love bodies and I love all the weird things they can do. In my work, I perform acts that some people would see as shocking: full nudity, live tattooing, peeing, kissing worms. But they’re not intended to shock. I see these acts as a euphoric embrace of the absurdity of living in a human body: an acknowledgement that we all feel strange and vulnerable inside. I’m just externalising those feelings and allowing them to generate laughter, connection, and community.
Ultimately, I want to embrace this idea of monstrosity to create a collective sense of liberation in the room, a feeling that we’re all in this slop together: working it out, having a laugh, and finding great joy and power in that journey. So come on down into the bog – the mud’s just fine.
Primal Bog is directed by Posey Mehta and produced by Bighead Comedy.
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