IF YOU relish the unexpected, it is impossible not to enjoy reading Andre Stitt's CV. Just look. It starts off calmly enough, with a tranquil seeming six years at Seymour Hill Primary School in Belfast, until 1969. From there it moves on to the equally innocuous period at Dunmurry High School. Even up to a mid Seventies phase at the Ulster Polytechnic, there is nothing like a blip of the bizarre.

But then comes 1977. "Met Alastair MacLennan (becomes personal tutor)". From there on in, things begin to fray a little. 1979: "Start of involvement in International Mail Art & Underground Networking Counter Cultural Activities." 1981-82: "Co-ordinator Zen Abattoir Multi Media Events, London." 1984: "Co ordinator of When the Shit Hits the Fan Events, London." 1987: "Beginning of the Quest for Cat, Sad, Oporto, Portugal."

Throw in a liberal helping of "akshuns" (Stitt's uses this phonetic version of the word action, because "without the k it's too soft") inspired by everything from the horror of the Shankhill Butchers to Kentucky Fried Chicken, the occasional outing with the multimedia collective, the Exploding Cinema, some gigs with the Self Righteous Brothers, and a CD released on an independent Texan label, and you, quickly get the message that Andre Stitt's 1980s were not filled with stock options, company cars and Italian suits.

Although Stitt remains uncomfortable with the term "live art" he is nevertheless about to take a part in this year's "Live at the Project", a mini festival given over to just that realm of activity. Not quite fitting into pre ordained patterns is not, however, anything new for the Belfast born Stitt.

IN THE late 1970s, Stitt played around Belfast in a punk band called Ask Mother. It was, he says, around a time as bands such as Rudi and The Outcasts, when the city's Good Vibrations record label was at its peak. Stitt's outfit, Ask Mother, was not, however, as chirpy as some of the bands at the time, who were producing surprisingly bubbly teenage guitar pop.

"We were more into the Stooges, that kind of stuff. Darker stuff. Very much darker stuff," says Stitt of his old band. "We used to do stuff on stage. All that auto destructive stuff. Smashing up stuff. Burning stuff. Daubing slogans and stuff.

At art college, he found that the tracks laid down for him to follow did not seem to lead anywhere he wanted to go. At first he practised as a painter, working within, "the action painting/expressionist tradition. These days, he still produces drawings in a colourful, expressive style but the images are always ancillary to his "akshuns".

"It got to the point with painting where I said: `I'm involved with the body, the form and the motivation of what I'm going through. This is what interests me and not the finished product, the commodity'".

One tutor was particularly helpful in illuminating the territory into which Stitt would eventually move. If one were to imagine an artist working in a manner that was the precise opposite to that of, Stitt, Scottish born Alastair MacLennan could easily be him. While Stitt's performances tended towards the frenetic, involving gushing fluids, and even fire, MacLennan's rely on effects that area self consciously unhurried, sedate even. MacLennan's work has, for example recently involved spending the day (wearing a black hood) in the blacked out toilets of the Project Arts Centre holding a candle on his knee.

"The influence that Alastair had was very unseen, in that he never actually taught me anything. He made a few suggestions. And he was always there to back me up if anything went wrong. If things got out of hand, which they always did in street performances, with people or with the army... what he said, I think, came down to the idea that it was not actually the work that people see that is important, but the hidden work. What people take away from a performance only really emerges over time, when things happen in their own lives.

"Art in general, and performance in particular, was always a way that I was able to ritualise and make manifest, something concrete that was going on inside me, something about how I looked at the world and my place in the world and also at my own separate reality, because I felt very cut off for a long time Confronting and breaking it down through addiction, I've been able to see another reality, or another perspective on it."

Stitt's period of addiction, which in eluded "a large amount of drugs of different sorts, not just heroin, climaxed in 1992. Around this time he had begun to be aware that his life and his sanity were in peril. "Alcohol was easy to get your hands on, but it did include just about anything you could get your hands on . . . I knew that what I was thinking wasn't sane . . . but something very deep inside of me was crying out and saying `no!'".

Then one afternoon, alone in his room, he had "a very strange, very extreme experience which I can only describe as a mystical experience, where I had the feeling that I had died. The memory that I still hold in my mind was of my body just draining out of my physical form... I was out for about 48 hours and when I came to everything had changed in my life."

SINCE then, he has embarked upon what he speaks of as "phase two" of his work. Previously, he says, much of the anger and violence of his art had been "turned in on" himself. He would perform dangerous, ritualistic actions, sometimes seeming to torture himself, trying to affect his body from within and without. While doing this, he suggests, he would attempt to contemplate the results of his actions, anaesthetising himself from the various forms of damage in what he was doing. Most effective in shutting off his defence mechanisms, was drugs.

Now, he is prepared to live more ink his performance, to experience it in a different way: "In a sense, it doesn't matter what the hell . . . It happens in the moment and it is gone. Today's truth is not tomorrow's truth . . . Now I can bear to think through to the other end of my performances because the motivation is in many ways more honest."

Honest motivations would seem to be essential, given the sort of life Stitt has chosen for himself. Although, as he points out, "it costs nothing to do a performance" it also pays next to nothing. His life remains gloriously uncertain, and far from any notions of a cosseted international avant garde art practitioner.

"Sure you've gotta pay the bills," he says. "So I do what any good Irish guy does in London, I work on the building sites. The sites allow me to work for a while and then lay off. They allow me to support my habit, which is art. It's very peculiar when people talk about this. I'm not interested in hierarchical systems. I don't even know what it means to get to the top. When I do a performance and I realise something, then I'm at the top."