Art in isolation: ‘All The Boys I Ever Kissed’

In more collaborative Pre-Covid (PC) times, one art experiment I hatched used names to trigger memory.

I randomly asked women to write the names of boys or men they remember kissing onto a pair of bright red lips I had printed onto a sheet of A4 paper.

I passed this document to any woman I knew, retreated, collected the document later and moved to my next collaborator.

On the rare occasions I watched as the women wrote the names, the look on their faces became the real piece of art. Each name written by hand tells a story that is owned totally by the woman who wrote it.

When I dropped the project onto pairs or groups of women, it became a bonding exercise. Conversations started from nowhere, memories exchanged, comparisons made.

So, All The Boys… is a piece of collaborative art by an unknown number of unidentifiable women. They are the authors of the image, as they are the authors of their own lives.

The title is deceptive. I am not the kisser. “I bet Pablo was a good kisser,” one viewer remarked.