i did it because i wanted to

‘Gutsy, voluble and grotesque, Martha Pailing’s piece is a wonderfully unseemly and weird outpouring of speech. Reading from a towelled diary, Pailing traverses a terrain of people in all their messy and vulgar brilliance. The language of the piece has a strange distinctive poetry with an insatiable and greedy cadence. The pedestrian nature of the performance slides into the surreal, however in its strangeness it taps into some truth…’
- Georgia Bates
full write up here

May 2016, Hackney Studios.

I Did It Because I Wanted To is a series of writings exploring the abominable intensity: selfishness.
Perceived selfishness, plotted and spontaneous selfishness, selfishness selfishness and perhaps small (very small) recovering moments of selflessness.

Collected, collated and considered, the performance is primarily a response to over 70 anonymous survey submissions surrounding self-gratification, self-worship and self-motivation. The work is a site of personal memoirs, borrowed stories, and donated experiences whereby the collector recreates, rewords, reimagines and responds, offering something to both the contributor and the audience through the transferal of material. I Did It Because I Wanted To is a patchwork of moments, an exhibition of 70 selves, a ceremony of swallowed spiky truths.