Becoming Connie Cyclonic
by Steve Xoh

Back in April this year, my studio building replaced its bottle-fed water cooler with a mains-fed one. Not only was this a great way to make sure we never ran out of drinking water, it also significantly reduced the amount of plastic used in the process. A couple of days before all of the empty water bottles were collected, I looked at one and thought, “That would fit on my head,” and quickly smuggled it into my studio.

I had no plans beyond this observation and, over the next couple of months, began to improvise with the bottle. I had previously made a large mask of a character called Len, so I decided I wanted to create a more feminine character. I cut the bottle to give it a chin, added a nose and painted two big blue eyes with bold eyeshadow and lashes. I decided the mask was called Connie, after the brilliantly weird outsider musician Connie Converse. I settled on the surname Cyclonic because I have always been fascinated by hearing that word in the Radio 4 Shipping Forecast (e.g. “becoming cyclonic later”).

The more time I spent with Connie, the more I got to know her. She had long black hair and a fringe, and wore a lovely long tiger-print dress. I decided that Connie would make her first public appearance at the Samphire Hoe Solstice Celebration, a wonderful, nature-focussed art residency that I was taking part in later that month. As the residency was organised by the Bee Friendly Trust, I realised that Connie wanted to wear black-and-yellow striped socks and gloves, and a pair of chunky Crocs decorated with paintings of various bugs and bees.

Connie wanted to do something in the strange blue tower at Samphire Hoe, and I helped her come up with something we called “An Intimate Audience with Connie Cyclonic”. This involved members of the public queuing outside the tower and coming in one at a time for a kind of fortune-telling experience. But instead of using tarot, Connie used a combination of Oblique Strategies cards, Animal Top Trumps and Panini World Cup football stickers. I spent another week making a strange little box with three compartments for the cards, each one numbered so that the audience could choose the order in which they were drawn.

As I pictured what this would be like, I realised that I was creating a world in which Connie felt very much at home and would be inviting people into it. I realised that music felt important and found an old portable tape player on eBay, onto which I recorded Connie Converse’s album How Sad, How Lovely. I also brought a comfort object for Connie that would help keep her feeling safe and regulated: a small hand-crocheted Jeremiah the Brave that my daughter made for me last Christmas.

On arriving at Samphire Hoe, I realised that Connie wouldn’t have anything to sit on in the tower, so I spent the day making a huge, oversized throne out of driftwood. Late that afternoon, members of the public came to Connie with questions that were important to them and, as she sat in silence with the tinny tape recorder playing in the background and the sea crashing against the rocks outside the window, she offered random cards as an answer. It was a weird and wonderful experience for everyone who came, but the thing that surprised me most was how utterly lovely it was to be Connie.

The next morning, a wonderful artist called Nicolas led a Solstice procession to the beach. Everyone wore masks they had made or decorated their hair and bodies with seaweed and other found objects. I decided that, despite the heat and a dangerous lack of peripheral vision, I wanted to complete the procession as Connie. I find it hard to describe my experience other than to say that being Connie felt like it liberated parts of me that I didn’t know needed liberating. As she couldn’t see very well, she had to have her arm held for the entire walk to the beach, and she didn’t resist being looked after in this way, appreciating her limitations. To help her stay calm, she held Jeremiah close and played her little tape player as she walked, pressing pause whenever the group stopped to talk or listen to Nicolas. When people spoke to Connie, or Nicolas asked her which way the group should go, she simply paused to feel whatever she was feeling. There was no rush to respond, no pressure to come up with the right answer, only to indicate with a gesture when she knew what she wanted. The whole experience of being non-verbal felt utterly joyful, like a lifting of pressure through not having to find the right words.

When the group reached the beach, Connie wanted to walk into the water. As the waves hit her Crocs and soaked her socks, it felt right. She continued walking until the water reached her thighs, then simply turned to look at the beach and all the humans on it. There was no need to perform, no concern about being perceived as weird or misunderstood. Just a sense of peace and connectedness with everything.

When Connie left the sea, I realised that I would have to say goodbye to her and become me again, but I had no idea how to do this. I felt a reluctance to disconnect from this strange but liberating part of myself. I lay down flat on the stony beach and gradually removed her head. As I did, my eyes filled with tears and I felt a huge amount of emotion being released. Then a little kid who had been hanging around with us all weekend said to me, “I knew it was you inside there!”, which felt like the most perfect transition back to reality.

I’ve no conclusions to any of this. I’ve worked with masks for many years now and appreciate how they can give us access to parts of ourselves that are unknown or atrophied. But the whole experience of becoming Connie Cyclonic felt like one of the most profound creative experiments I have ever undertaken. One that only happened because I realised that a water bottle would fit on my head.