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STRETCHED: brief outcome - connecting to themes running through my studio practice, I wanted to use them to direct this brief. my canvas represents and explores the body as something that exists outside of social constrains, instead being something that transcends it, simply being a natural form. This work is about feeling as though you have broken free, a burning of constraints similar to that of the canvas medium, but still caught and tied by the internalisation of beauty and society. (fabric and glue on burnt wooden frame)

ABOVE: an experimentation attempting to combat being unable to remember experiences or being able to cope with things feeling as though they didn't happen or didn't exist by having to recreate how it feels to be touched by someone you love. Trying instead to make a permanent record of an experience, memory or feeling that's important to me and that I dont want to lose as an experimental way of keeping fleeting moments my brain won't keep for me.

MATTERS OF CARE | DARE | SHARE

The theme running throughout this series of photo experimentation is exploring feeling like a monster and the feelings about being gay I had when I was younger making me feel monstrous. the work is about trying to embrace the monstrous feeling and taking the other, making it mine to have control over these distorted and internalised messages surrounding queer identities.
This work is also exploring trying to feel physical sensations and putting ones self into jarring situations, in an attempt to cope with feelings of unreality and disassociation.
It is attempting to connect with a body that doesn't feel like mine, that I dont identify with and that doesn't feel like a part of me by trying experience intense body feelings, in this case cold water. (scroll across to see all photography)

furthermore, choosing to make artistic photos of my body and deliberately including it in my art, even though im so uncomfortable with it and don't like looking at it or seeing it photographed, has been a way to challenge this intense thoughts and feelings.

ABOVE: The bunny mask is an endeavour to create a physical representation of the paradoxical experience of feeling like your two things at once. The bunny represents innocence, safety and feeling like a benign presence and its monstrous nature through the distortion of extra eyes and teeth is a representation of feeling like a dangerous monster who others aren't safe around.
My feelings towards liking women seemed other from the image of heteronormative femininity and passivity I feel pressured to embody. In other words, it is a metaphor for the experience of otherness or violating the role I'm supposed to play.
I'm hoping to show the mental discrepancy of being cast by society as both a predator for my queerness and pray for the traditional narrative for correct womanhood, assumptions and stereotypes placed upon me from the outside due to being born female. Thus, encapsulating my feelings of failure and betrayal of societies expectations of me. (3D pen plastic, fabric, foil, teeth, paint)

RIGHT: hyper awareness of social interaction and how people around you behave in order to appear correct or normal in how you act. the alienation that accompanies difficulty understanding social cues and expectations as well as the awareness that no matter how hard you try, those around you still seem to recognise something is wrong in a way that you are unable, and they find you weird or false - i.e. the visual difference created by wearing the mask. the eyes simultaneously evoke eye contact and the struggle to gauge the correct amount of eye contact to make with someone. (plaster, bandage, oil on canvas, plastic)

RETAKE | REMAKE | REFEAME

Use of mould to explore emotions relating to my lack of childhood memories and the feeling that my brain and sense of self is slowly disintegrating or degrading over time. I created this piece with objects and letter from my childhood that I now can't remember the context for or reason I decided to keep them. As a way of expressing the grief and guilt I feel for having forgotten what were likely sentimental keep sakes from friendships and relationships with people that despite their importance to me for the gift of connection and their choice to spend time befriending me, I have dis-serviced them by my failure to remember. (embroidery, cotton, text on fabric, paint, objects)

Clown inspired masks - completely covering the face to show loss of identity or recognisability and symbolic use of clowns to evoke absurdity, feeling of futility and simply performing a role for the benefit and entertainment of others and not yourself.
(Below: fabric, lace. Right: knitting, acrylic wool)

END OF YEAR EXHIBITION INSTALLATION
The reason for the moths is because you often find them in attics and closets where old objects and materials are kept like teddy bears or wedding dresses. It can be devastating for anyone to go to look back at their sentimental items and find them infested and eaten away by moths. In this way I hope to capture once again the experience of having my childhood memories being fragmented and sometimes completely missing. I chose to use audio from an old VHS tape of myself and my family when I was a child as well as words or short phrases written on the fabric to try and recreate an audience experience of not quite being able to read the writing, due to it being white on white fabric, or inverted. The audio is also distorted and made to sound far away through editing software as well as being played at a volume that requires the viewer to crouch down close to the fabric structure in order to hear it, similar to eavesdropping a conversation you just cant quite catch the meaning of. The text and audio elements replicating how it feels for me personally trying to remember sections of my childhood. The house itself is a recreation of a cardboard house my mother built for me (pictured above) that was a fixtures in my bedroom for a few of my early years and that ive seen in pictures but dont actually hold my own memories of. The use of white in this and my previous project is to strip the defining characteristics of the items and structures involved as a way of replicating the blank and empty gaps in memory and their unsettling nature.

RIGHT: Experiments for how to make masks and the use of masks and costume withing my work is intended as a vehicle to display the many different facets and intersections of identity. the stereotypes and social roles that exist for us, as the mask symbolises the performative aspect and false costume of narratives forced upon us from outside ourselves.
these conflicting roles can cause great mental confusion and anguish as we try to embody these disparate abstract and arbitrary concepts. (Right: polymer clay. Far right: plaster cast of face)

LEFT + BELOW: This outcome (dead bird with face) is an attempt to recreate the surrealism of disassociation and abstract societal rules for ling. the use of the bird with a human face was inspired by the idea of the psychopomps, creatures or spirits often symbolised or represented by birds that originated in Greek mythology as escorts for souls in the after life. As disassociation from reality can sometimes feel similar to travelling through a world that you are not a part of or that isn't truly real. The use of fantastical creatures and combinations of things in reality into one new being are representative of the duality of the physical self and the constructs and symbols placed over top of it. Using the juxtapositions of surrealism to form an amalgamation of two things that exist separately in reality to highlight the disparate nature of experiencing the dream like feeling of unreality and other people living their lives as if nothing is wrong.
(polymer clay, fabric, wire)

BELOW: planned as the mask element of a larger costume concept, the teeth again draw on themes of monsterization, but more specifically the use of teeth symbolises hunger for recognition by society and for a sense of self and identity.
as well as this it relates to personal feelings of an inner

RIGHT (TEETH) CONTINUED: emptiness that i am constantly attempting to fill. In connection with the use of hunger as a metaphor, these attempts are often through buying or acquiring material possessions. The futile promise of consumerism as a way to achieve happiness and my place as endless unsatisfied, hungry consumer and the guilt that