Interview: Behind The Paint

WORDS BY: ARIELA KOZIN

Artists are so cherished because they turn themselves inside-out. They use pieces of their lives to make audiences stop, take a step back, and feel. Although she may have not always been aware of it, Millie Brown‘s awe-inducing, vibrant aesthetic was shaped by all that she has experienced and who she has experienced it with. Here is her story.

Tell me about your upbringing and how it led you to a career as a performance artist.

I was brought up by my mother who is very much a creative herself—she’s always used different mediums of art in her work. I grew up between England, France, and Spain and she homeschooled me for a lot of those years. So when we were living in Spain she was my teacher and we lived in the middle of the countryside, in the middle of nowhere on top of a mountain. She would just use the earth and all the things around us to teach me how to create things out of nothing. I’ve always lived in a very creative environment, my mom always taught us to explore different expressions and mediums.

When I was living in France they didn’t even teach art in a lot of the schools, so I studied art even more so by myself and then when I was 17 I joined this art collective called !WOWOW!. It was a collective of fashion designers, artists, musicians, and all kinds of different creative people. We all lived in South London in this huge abandoned warehouse and made an agreement with the landlord to basically inhabit this space and create.

So, !WOWOW! fostered a lot of collaboration? 

Yeah, it was really amazing having access to this giant space where we could create things on such a large scale and really use our imaginations—just let loose in that space and create whatever we wanted to create. That was a really amazing time and that’s when I realized it was possible to do art in a way I wanted to do it—in a real way.

So that was your first official art show? With the collective? 

Yeah, it was actually in Berlin where I did the first show. It was with this amazing notorious performance artist Mark McGowan. And so I met him in Berlin and the first performance piece I did I actually vomited an entire rainbow in this gallery in Berlin. Then, ever since that first time I performed—it was something I wanted to explore. I think the second that I performed I realized that that was what I wanted to be doing; creating performances as a career.

How did you get involved with Lady Gaga and how did you end up on stage vomiting rainbows on her? 

I met Lady Gaga in 2009 through Nick Knight, who is this amazing photographer and director from London— he was actually the first proper person I worked for when I was 17. I created this performance film and Nick Knight was working with Lady Gaga at the time and I guess he had told her about my work, so she just called me up one day and asked if I’d collaborate with her and if I’d vomit a rainbow on her. It was like Tuesday morning, I was doing something really boring—I was on my way to the bank or something—and she called me up and was like, “Will you vomit a rainbow on me?” I said, “I really don’t have plans right now, I’m going to the bank, so sure.” A couple of hours later she sent a car to my house and I went down to meet her and Nick Knight to discuss what we were going to do.

Somebody came up with the concept for the festival interlude performance piece —so that was my first experience of Gaga and we just seemed to get each other immediately. I just respect the way she works and the way she’s so heavily involved in everything that she does. We did the festival interlude and we just stayed in touch until we both randomly ended up being in Austin for SXSW. We were chatting about it and agreed, “let’s meet up the second we get to Austin.” We came up with the performance idea and it was really funny cause when we were coming up with the performance, she said there’s a mechanical bull, but it was a pig instead of a bull. We ended up deciding on us climbing on top of each other and performing on the mechanical pig while I threw up paint on her.

I went the human condition in Los Angeles where you were suspended in a morgue. Someone mentioned to me that you were meditating? 

I’ve always meditated in some form. My dad used to live next to this British monastery and he used to help out there so I would go while he was working and meditate there when I was a kid. It’s always been a part of my life. I’ve just used it some times more than others and I think I definitely used it in different forms in my performance a lot, to kind of get to the place that I want to be.

Every single performance is still challenging in some different way. I don’t think there’s ever been a performance where it’s like, “Ah, that was a nice relaxing performance.” It still feels amazing to achieve that each time and feel like you’re kind of growing on some level.

You almost always use bright colors and glitter in your art. Why?

Well, I feel like I’ve always, always been very drawn to color. Like you see pictures of me as a kid and it’s really not that different from today—like my choice of outfits and color and everything. It’s really, really similar. Also, I feel like in life you have to celebrate the light. In everything there is darkness, but is also light. I think it’s important to not ignore the darkness, but also embrace the light.