Enduramorphosis: Performance as Transformation Through Endurance

This book unfolds the theory of enduramorphosis, an emergent strangeness that arises in an endurance performance when the body is pushed to its limit and reacts.

Artist Chelsea Coon works across performance and lens-based extensions in photography, video, livestream, digital arts, and new media. Through her work, Coon explores how enduramorphosis is manifested differently across divergent performances. Written from a first-person perspective, this book presents an accessible intellectual exploration of the process and conceptualization of provocative and profound performances. Chelsea Coon combines powerful emotional resonance with physical and psychological extremes, giving the reader insights into the phenomenon of enduramorphosis and a rare glimpse into the motivations, feelings, desires and visceral excesses experienced by the performing body as it undergoes a transformation that lasts.

Chelsea Coon is an artist and writer whose work focuses on the shifting interconnections of the body, time, and space. She earned her PhD in practice-led artistic research at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, Australia. She has exhibited, performed, and published extensively internationally, and her work considers the limits of the body and the enduring effects of frameworks in her works across performance, photography, video, painting, sculpture, installation, printmaking, and text.