Jennifer Allen, known professionally as Quilla Constance, is a British contemporary interdisciplinary artist and lecturer, born in Birmingham, 1980.
Education
Allen graduated from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art , St John's College, University of Oxford, with a BA (Hons) Fine Art in 2001 and earned an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2006. She later studied acting at Rose Bruford College
Persona and style
Shortly after completing her master's degree, Allen created her Quilla Constance persona as an extension of the exoticised, androgynous punk-carnival aesthetic and malevolent demeanour explored in her earlier video and performance works and "to locate a point of agency within a hegemonic framework of white phallocentric order". Constance subsequently began staging performances in clubs, theatres, art galleries, music venues, the street and mainstream television.
Quilla Constance (abbreviated to QC) stages interventions across an interdisciplinary practice of paintings, lectures, photographs, live performances, costumes and music videos. Her live performance work has been noted for its "unflinching physical narrative performed entirely through breath, posture and non-verbal sounds: panting like a dog, sex noises, then laughter, pure guttural anger, and back again".
Other commentaries suggest that "QC over-identifies with an 'exotic' militant punk persona to interrogate category-driven capitalist networks, through staging and virally inserting her artistic practice within pop culture, traversing music venues, forging protests and entering art galleries in order to emulate and interrupt the operations of these cultural zones".
QC's varied art practice also frequently 'scrutinises food as a signifying system onto which social class and ethnic identities are mapped out, from fried chicken in cardboard take¬away boxes to tea in fine, bone china cups.' where she questions the limitations of categories, boundaries, and contexts to humorous and destabilising effect.
Career
Allen's video and performance works have been exhibited internationally since 2003 and are held in the art collections of Anita and Poju Zabludowicz, David Roberts' Art Foundation, and Goldsmiths College (Warden's).
In 2003, Allen was awarded British and Arts Council funding for her solo exhibition and artist's residency at BizArt Center, Shanghai, China through the ARTLINKART International Residency Programme.
In 2007, Allen guest curated a video screening at 176 London, Zabludowicz Collection. The event featured Allen's 2006 video work 'Happy Christmas Mom & Dad', a piece that sees Allen allegedly perform a seductive dance as a gift for her parents on Christmas Day.
In an interview with arts patron Shalini Passi, Constance stated that "My current professional name is Quilla Constance ... which is an art persona I've cultivated and deployed since 2009. My birth name is Jennifer Allen, and the name I operated under from 2001 to 2009"
In 2010, Constance staged a 'militant punk protest performance' outside the former Punk Soho nightclub in order to challenge the venue for cancelling a Quilla Constance punk performance in favour of a corporate booking. She later successfully prosecuted the club's promoter through Equity.
In 2011, the 80s synth-pop and New Romanticism artists Rusty Egan and Steve Strange invited Constance to perform at a reunion in the former Soho Blitz Club. Later that year, she performed at Fierce! Festival, Birmingham alongside Cakes da Killa.
In 2015, 2017 and 2019 Allen was awarded funding from Arts Council England in support of a series of Quilla Constance solo projects and exhibitions: 'Teasing Out Contingencies: Quilla Constance Open Studio' at Tate Modern, Tate Exchange 'Transcending The Signified' at The Museum of Contemporary Art/ MOCA, London, which toured to the Old Fire Station Theatre, Oxford; '#QC' at The Kendrew Barn, St John's College, Oxford and 'PUKIJAM' at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, curated by Maria Kheirkhah. PUKIJAM received additional support from The Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN); and Diversity Arts Forum In December 2017 Allen's artworks were discussed in a paper presented at the conference 'Black Artists and Modernism: Conceptualism – Intersectional Readings, International Framings' held at Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands.