The Peter Rippon/Royal Academy of Art Travel Award is awarded to one MFA or Certificate student to travel to the Royal Academy of Art and the New York Studio School to expand their students globally. Zipporah Norton (MFA 2024) was the 2024 recipient and shares her experience below.

My planning process for the Peter Rippon / Royal Academy Travel Award fell into disorder with the sudden death of my grandfather. I arrived in London a week after he passed, grieving and unprepared for weeks of solitude and bad weather. (The recent inauguration was also demoralizing in its own way). Without much of an itinerary, I felt immediate pressure to do a “good job” seeing shows and finding the heart of the London contemporary art scene.

While visiting the Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain, I stumbled upon Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. The trip to London was worth it just to experience the tryptic in-person. I was craving Bacon’s intensity, the disturbing abstractions of bodies in anguish, the limited and loud palette. I spent most of the afternoon alone with this piece.

A friend recommended I check out the theater and performance art programming at Battersea Arts Centre. I bought a ticket without knowing much about the show that evening: TESTO by the trans drag artist known as Wet Mess. The ‘text’ and soundscape of the piece is a collage of Wet Mess’ interviews with trans Londoners. The subjects talked candidly about gender euphoria, testosterone, navigating the NHS, coming out as trans, and more. Wet Mess transformed the interview recordings into a highly choreographed lip-synch performance (with both sets of lips: mouth and labia), in a unique combination of drag, burlesque, and documentary-theater forms.

Wet Mess gave a masterclass in testing the limits of their audience’s discomfort, while also seducing them to engage with the work. I strive for this quality in my art. Leading up to the trip, I was experiencing a slump in creativity and motivation, but these profound encounters with Francis Bacon and Wet Mess have inspired me to integrate live performance into my sculpture practice.

I returned to Brooklyn and started work on Temper Tantrum. The process started with building an oversized papier-mache mask of a clown/sad-baby having a full-on meltdown. The movement and choreography emerged naturally from the character of the mask-object. The sad-baby initiates the piece by slow-dancing with a Cassio keyboard (playing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy). Eventually, the sad-baby switches tunes to “Y.M.C.A” by Village People and removes their mask and jumpsuit, revealing a large pair of Hanes underpants, a child’s tank top, and a wig that obscures their face.

The final and most impactful show on my itinerary was the Mike Kelley retrospective, Ghost and Spirits, at the Tate Modern, with work from the 1970’s to 2010’s. Seeing Kelley hop across different media gave me confidence in my shift toward performance art. In Banana Man (a riff on Captain Kangaroo), Kelley appears to be hosting a children’s television show—the piece frenetically cuts between snippets of ‘episodes,’ inviting the audience to form a narrative or a nostalgia for a program/mascot that never existed. When staging Temper Tantrum and choosing the music, I reflected on the narrative I imposed on top of Banana Man’s slippery structure. My work has a more intentional linear structure, but I’m playing with the same suggestive power of a bizarre character stripped of context.