about the work...
This project, titled Queer Fabrications, takes on a history of portraiture to dismantle the idea of the portrait as necessarily representative. The series explores alternative possibilities for depicting/making communities through art with performativity as its starting point. Firstly, these portraits attempt to work through the realities of the Queer body as self-made, transforming, and uncategorizable. The body is unable to be ‘captured’ by an artwork. Instead, the relationship of viewer and artwork collapses the portrait in new and ongoing ways every time.
Queer Fabrications is a series of interconnected portraits that have developed from a language of Queerness as found, remade, undefined, real, and parodied. Playing with a wide variety of mediums in unexpected ways, the series includes traditional oil painted portraits onto found objects, as well as made and found costumes displayed alongside photographic prints. Each ‘canvas’ has been carefully selected and altered so as to be almost unidentifiable, an object that resists the easy collapse of categorisation. The photographs are displayed alongside the costumes to retain a sense of materiality and craftmanship that is integral to the creation of the Queer body. The gallery becomes a stage for each character, performances caught between documentary and parody.
Joel, 2021, single channel video