Pendulum

 Performance and exhibition of physical works curated by Stacy Engman at Chicago Expo. 

In this durational performance, British artist Millie Brown transforms her own body into a living instrument—at once brush, conduit, and ritual object. Suspended upside down for six continuous hours, her body becomes the axis of a human pendulum, oscillating slowly through space as pigment is poured over her skin, cascading in arcs and splatters onto the canvas below.

Drawing on the physicality of endurance art and the symbolic language of transformation, Brown enacts a visceral meditation on presence, pain, and surrender. Bound in shibari and detached from the ground, she relinquishes control, allowing gravity and momentum to dictate the form and composition of the work. The result is an abstract expression of bodily movement and elemental force—a choreography of impact rendered in paint.

“The intention was to become both subject and tool,” Brown explains. “To let go of authorship and become a vessel through which energy and intention could move. There’s liberation in that loss of control—where discomfort gives way to transcendence, and the body becomes something more than flesh.”

The performance is not simply an act of creation, but a ritual of self-erasure and rebirth. Brown’s suspended form becomes a symbol of raw humanity in tension with its own limitations, swinging between states of exertion and release. Through this intense physical offering, she redefines authorship, offering a practice where the body itself writes in gestures, in gravity, in pain.

What emerges is not only a painting, but a record of time and transformation—a living trace of the artist’s body in motion, suspended between vulnerability and power.

Link to film: http://amp.nowness.com/story/millie-brown-pendulum