Initially trained as a dancer, Blum later moved to London and graduated from Central St Martins and the Royal Academy Schools. Blum’s practice is rooted in performance but extends to photography, text, and moving image. There’s music too – Blum is also an accomplished musician and singer who performed at Roskilde, Denmark one of Europe’s largest music festivals, in 2023. The characters she conjures and choreographs for her live and recorded performances are often singing and dancing enactments too – shot through with a sharp sense of humour.

Blum’s Champion for The Wick is gallerist Ilenia Rossi who called Blum: “one of the most exciting performance artists of her generation. Trained as a dancer, Blum’s performances see her body moving rhythmically to self-composed music, reading texts or interacting with fictional alter-egos that appear on-screen within her video installations. Blum’s multidisciplinary approach to performance uses autobiographical narratives, stereotypical characters and archetypes to explore themes of identity, self-representation and body politics within the context of contemporary culture and media. Grounded in art-historical awareness and self-reflexivity, Blum’s performances retain a humorous yet critical approach to the medium, inviting viewers to engage with its fluid nature.”

“I’ve always been interested in ‘performance’ in the widest sense”, Blum told The Wick. “In my live performances I often conflate the stage with real life by dramatising autobiographical events and building upon relationships and interactions I have with acquaintances or strangers. I also draw a lot on stand-up-comedy and television.” She also turns to literature, especially female writers who deal with sexuality, the body, and abjection, like Jenny Hval. “I’m also fascinated by relationships between writers who write (sometimes disparagingly) about each other, like Kathy Acker on Erica Jong. I’ve been reading about Virginia Woolf’s and Hannah Arendt’s ideas about the difficulty of narrating bodily pain, while working on my own texts that deal with recurring pain.”

As well as music and performance, moving image has been a constant in Blum’s practice from the start. At first, she would act and perform to camera, but in recent video works, “I treated video as a medium to create a rhythm or music.” In her work for the Claridge’s ArtSpace show she has constructed a narrative through film for the first time. “I really enjoyed acting in my friend Kevin Brennan’s film recently ‘Checked Out’ shown at the 2024 RA Schools Show) and have approached my own work with scripting and cinematography in mind.”

In 2022, Blum’s work screened as part of Circa x Dazed Class of 2022 at Piccadilly Circus “like a kid’s dream come true”, Blum says. But for now, all her attention has been directed towards the making and unveiling of her solo exhibition at Claridge’s ArtSpace, Drip Drip Point Warp Spin Buckle Rot, where she’s transformed the architecture of the underground gallery into an immersive space with theatrical lighting, and a new three-channel video work. “As someone who works predominantly with live performance, I’ve enjoyed immensely the challenge of constructing an exhibition that ‘performs’ with and without my physical presence”, she told The Wick. We get the impression Blum is never one to be daunted in the face of something new or uncertain – and that’s what makes her such an enticing artist to watch.