Decca Faire (b. 1998, Norfolk, England) is a mixed media artist specialising in film, photography, spoken word and endurance performance. Her practice is a distinctively active one. Through the physically demanding pursuits of ultra-marathon running, distance walking and cold water swimming, she explores themes of womanhood, isolation, freedom, and endurance. To these ends, she makes idiosyncratic use of figure in the landscape.Building on a rich range of feminist influences across art and literature, Decca's aesthetic and conceptual aims are overtly political. Just as Ana Mendieta, in the Silueta Series, fused herself with the earth in an exploration of womanhood and exile, Decca's endurance performances at once mythologise, and dissolve, our conventional notions of gender and self. In dreamlike, rarefied spaces, Decca portrays identities driven to the mountains or the seas — and stripped of all cultural attachments — by the infernal pressures of patriarchy. What remains is a profound intimacy with these spaces. They come to represent, for Decca sites of prolepsis, promise, and liberation. Recalling Margaret Tait’s tender renderings of the Orkney Islands, Decca's vision of the landscape is lucid and careful. This vision is also, paradoxically, made by no subject – for that subject has become one with its object. Studies of haptic details are inflected with an impersonal representation of the landscape’s infinite and irreducible mystery. This – as Nan Shepherd wrote – is how the Earth must see itself.Graduating in 2021 from The Glasgow School of Art with a First class degree in Fine Art Photography, she has since exhibited in Glasgow, Norfolk, Brighton and Edinburgh. Much of her early work was inspired by living on the Norfolk coast where she grew up, and in whose landscapes, among others, she finds solace. More recently her work has taken her to the Alps, where she completed The Haute route (a 225 km walk crossing 11 passes reaching a height of 2,987m) as a piece of endurance performance. This work featured in The New Contemporaries exhibition in the spring of 2023, where she was awarded The Walter Scott prize by the Royal Scottish Academy.
