From 1-5pm on Sunday 26 February artist Katy Baird is inviting an audience to come and spend some time chatting with her inside Hurwundeki in Hackney Central whilst beauty industry professionals will wax, pluck, paint, attach and inject her body in order to help Katy achieve a brand new look for herself. 

This one-off durational performance entitled Transformation takes place during the CUT Festival, and is one of five new commissions exploring the politics of hair in particular social sites.

Transformation is also part of Redress, a three-year artistic research and dialogue project in which Katy hopes to facilitate and encourage discussion around the ways in which we inhabit and discard external identities throughout our lives. Here, Katy writes for Run Riot on her work for Transformation and Redress so far.

Redress began in January 2016 with the first of three separate year-long performances in which I looked back and explored an identity of my past that I had long since discarded.

For the whole of 2106 I went back to the look of my late teens.

In 1994 I was 16 and having just came out as a lesbian, I was enjoying to the full all the delights that the Glasgow gay scene had to offer. Looking back I see that my fashion, hairstyle, drink choice and music interests also changed considerably at this time.

I started to become more masculine in my clothes choices, favouring baggy Levi designed jeans with men’s dress shirts which featured a vast array of different logos on their pocket - Fred Perry Polo, Yves St Laurent, Lacoste and Kickers being my most favourite, all topped off with my box-fresh brown Timberland boots. The boots were legitimate Timberlands, which I bought with my Christmas money from the shop Schuh and the Levi jeans were also legit, having purchased them from my mum’s catalogue but most of the dress shirts were cheap, fake, branded items, bought from a girl called Amanda who used to sell them in the pubs around Glasgow. My hair was just above my shoulders and I always wore it in a ponytail as I had an under-cut shaved in the back that I loved to show off.

When thinking about how I would reconstruct this look in 2016 at the age of 39, I decided very early on that it wouldn’t work to completely re-create it but would be more interesting to re-imagine what I would look like now if I had kept to that look for all these years. 

The first thing that needed to change was my hair. I was lucky to be able to work with the very talented hairdresser Craig McAtear who transformed my long pink curly hair into a sharp, short silver spike.

It was quite shocking at first and took a wee while to get used too. It is funny how attached we can get to our hair. Craig said many of us go to the hairdresser asking for a dramatic change but are also adamant that none of the length is lost. Seems like we always desire change but just not too much of it!

Next thing to replace was my clothes; I visited Westfield in Stratford and went shopping in the men’s departments. I realised that the size issue was the same, as it was with women’s clothing and to get XL sizes you still had to go to the larger department stores. I also was never sure if I could use the changing room in the men’s section, as it doesn’t explicitly say it’s for men only. In the end I would haul everything up to the dressing room on the women’s floor and always feel super guilty that the person working in the that dressing room would have to traipse back down to the men’s section with all the stuff I didn’t want.

I then began to think about my relationships. I was single when I started Redress so have no idea on the reaction from a partner if you suddenly completely change how you look and the way you dress. Would it have had an impact on our relationship? Would they have still fancied me in the same way?

I did have to change my dating app profile pictures though as it felt a bit weird to go on a date with someone and look so different to what was advertised on my profile.

In February 2016 I performed Picture Me as part of Cruising for Art in Helsinki, Finland. This was a performance for one audience member at a time in which they were invited to dress me up in my new clothes and take a new picture I could use on Tinder and OK Cupid.

Before we took the pics, we talked about my recent transformation and I gave them some information and guidelines to help make it the perfect image:

- Landscape images with a good sense of the person’s body type receive the most interest

- Photos featuring the left side of the face get more responses compared with pictures featuring the right side of the face

- The most popular online dating photographs look straight into the camera and smile with their teeth

- Men were found to be most attracted to women displaying happiness (smiling broadly)

- Women are most attracted to men displaying pride (head tilted up and expanded chest)

I think that they actually did a pretty good job: It has been an eventful first year with lots of great conversations and quite a few revelations. I have realised that when I was 16 I was using my clothes as a way of projecting an image of who I wanted to be rather than who I was and that actually I have done this a lot in my life.

Transformation kick-starts my second year of the Redress project, I am now going back to the look of my early twenties. At 22 I had very unexpectedly found myself in a relationship with a man – my dress shirts and baggy jeans had disappeared and I was now sporting a vast collection of tank tops, denim skirts and pretty sandals. This was a fun but rather confusing time in my life as I grappled with questioning and redefining who and what I was. Maybe now as I am just about to turn 40 I wonder if I am just doing the same thing all over again!

Redress is supported by Cut Festival and Camden People’s Theatre

More information on the Redress project will be online soon at Katybaird.com

On Sunday 26th February between 1-6pm, Katy Baird’s Transformations will take place at Hurwundeki, 156 Mare Street, London E8 3RG as part of CUT Festival Barbershop Takeover.

Admission is free.