Strategies for evoking the sensation of embodied alterity : space, mechanical movement, and soft sculpture

This studio-based research project explores the potential for an individual to experience and perceive their body as being at once familiar and unfamiliar. The investigation is driven by my autobiographical experience of being transgendered; seeking to articulate the simultaneous bodily awareness and dissociation present in the disconnect between how I socially present and my physical body. I propose such internalised sensations are universal conditions of being human, felt at varying intensities, and brought to the forefront in trans bodies. The works developed within the studio and later installed within the gallery utilize the potential for an individual to reflect and recognize themselves within materials that speak to, but are not, flesh; bodily without being anatomical. I propose that by confronting these proxy bodies viewers are prompted question to the familiarity with which they perceive their own body.
I seek to locate ways trans artists address and communicate their lived experience of being in the body, in particular through an exploration of fellow contemporary artists such as Dexter Rosengrave, Jes Jan and Cassils. A central concept in my research is David Getsy’s queer abstraction, which highlights the potential use of abstraction as a tool for queer artists to articulate their lived experiences. Similarly, by researching the oeuvres of artists including Francis Bacon, David Lynch, Pat Brassington and Louise Bourgeois, I develop my material and philosophical vocabulary for making physical the bodily anxiety at the heart of my research.
The research is grounded in a reading of the body as the vessel and means through which we manifest ourselves and through which we experience or relate to our environment. As such, the body mediates all sense and experience. This reading of the body is informed by the theoretical schools of phenomenology, affect theory and new materialism. From this understanding I propose a body which is both familiar and unfamiliar, inherently carrying with it uncertainty, anxiety, unease, intimacy, restlessness, vulnerability, alterity, and alienation; where the manipulation and abstraction of everyday materials articulate something which cannot otherwise be so viscerally communicated. These everyday materials include pillows, plywood, silk, and consumer grade mechanisms found in children’s toys or holiday decorations.
In the construction of works I employ a ‘jerry-rigged’ attitude to making, resulting in works which maintain a sense of precariousness and spontaneity. The candidness in the presentation of materials and process contrasts with the suggestive and layered nature of the meanings the works evoke from their proximity and temporary cohabitation with the viewer within the installation space. The works trigger affects by giving physical form to inner sensations, as though this sense of otherness has grown a physical form and crawled from the body.