Working within Naarm/Melbourne, I am a queer performance art artist exhibiting a series of acts that explore notions of the self in relation to geography. The work uses the embodiment of queer identity to explore the social requirements existing within location, allowing a hierarchical dominance of control. Commenting upon the queer body, my bodily performances create a unique state of ‘being’, one that is entangled between parallels of a kind of 'performative' nature. Citizens of society need to learn how to designate permissible actions to be accepted within heterosexual as well as homosexual spaces. This enforces a slur of mixed identities, consequently enacting a state of the ‘longing’ for permissibility and a ‘shame’ of the past. By rejecting multiple forms of identity I present a new self to my body and the viewer, one that sits within an alternate reality. This alternate reality is a place where I can exhibit new modes of being, fluxing between states that both recognise and objectify the internal and external parameters of systemic control. By transforming myself, renouncing the social desirability of success through a performative art practice, I alternatively present a self that exposes the dark, the melodramatic, the queer and the traumatic. This discloses the supposed ‘safe spaces’ in social realms, revealing that they are not safe to all but a new mode of control within an existing hierarchy.

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The Utter Faggotry of it All, 2021

performance [still]

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