My artistic practice is the attempt of translating the lived experience of being a lesbian into a visual language. This materiality is formed through exploring sculptural installation, and performance.
After experiencing a breakup, I started this years’ journey. During the break-up I felt like I could not process it in my artwork. Change came when I could not find a place for my feelings around the lived experience within my activism or social spaces: it had become claustrophobic.
The work has now become more than the break-up, evolving into a fuller comprehension of my lived experience. To look at what is a lesbian, and how it is we perceive sexuality beyond representational depictions of women. Does the art require a level of explicitness to be seen as discussing sexuality? How do you depict a minority that is double invisible, once due to their gender, and twice due to their sexuality?
My work’s material practice is settled to be based around T-shirts. The creases and flow of the material. The constant implication of interaction from both the act of wearing and the discarding of fabrics. I elevate the purpose of T-shirts to beyond its common day use, reconfiguring it into an object of translation.
I started with language to materialise my experience. Playing the role of translator. I use words as an act of reclaiming. Within queer culture and spaces, the act has become vital to de-stigmatise and use words, that had previously been oppressive, as a sign of strength. The Collective Fierce Pussy¹ has been a waypoint in my approach to reclaiming language. Their work with Lesbian language reclaims derogatory language, such as Dyke. Using discriminatory terms in a self-referential position, inviting the viewer to do the same. My first of my T-shirts ‘Make More Break-Up Songs’ emulated this intention, considering the conversation that can be brought on by slogan T-shirts within a contemporary setting.
In a personal conversation with Matthew Toresen MBE², we discussed the value of humour within campaigns and slogans in real life applications. The use of humour in translating queer experiences can be utilised as a way to not upfront heteronormative people but to allow them a space to understand queer pain and issues in such a way that there is still some positivity. If you can laugh about a topic, you can discuss it. Coming away from the conversation, I have attempted to use humour within the text of my work. Or at least I find the work humorous.
The invisibility within a minority led me to look at the visual language off ghostly figures. To be both in the role of threatening and misunderstood. I started playing with lesbianism beyond being a category, creating it to be a spectral entity, a ghost. Producing work that inhabits this entity has allowed for me as an artist to act on occupying space with my body.
The work of Mike Kelley has been integral in how I have developed further this medium of work. Kelley’s work in the exhibition Ghosts and Spirit, 2024³, showcased a multitude of material to creates works exploring identity and Ghosts. He does this through mocking popular culture, using performance, slogans and photography. His unique ownership of popular culture is insightful. Pop culture is not something that brought him pleasure, but he uses it as a consistent foundation to his medium as it is the culture he lived in. In return his translates this into work reflecting moments of his identity, a queered view on pain, egos and ghosts. In my work I take moments of my life and surrounding to depict my lesbian culture into ghostly figures and mocking slogans, shadowing a similar path to Kelley. This is shown in “Surrender”.
The work of Delaine Le Bas within the Turner Prize, 2024⁴, emphasized to me the way in installation can spotlight identity and support performance work. Le Bas didn't just create a performative space but embodied a surrounding in which themes of identity immersed the audience. In absence of a performer the work still held a strong space of identity. With ‘Amongst The Devastation I Feel Love’ I desire to capture the same effect.
Performance has become a means to show the vulnerability in inhabiting a performative creature. In my performance I am an embodiment of a mesh slogan shirts: when becoming stationary I become a living sculpture. Within performance I am also an object, being forgotten that I am a being. This is my attempt to translate the dismissal to acknowledge lesbians. The perception comes from both me and the audience, and so does the vulnerability.
¹‘Fierce Pussy: Interview’.
² ‘Matthew Toresen MBE | LinkedIn’.
³ Tate, ‘Mike Kelley | Tate Modern’.
⁴ Tate, ‘Turner Prize 2024 | Tate Britain’.
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Bibliography:
Matthew Toresen MBE | LinkedIn’. Accessed 2 May 2025.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-toresen-mbe-02bba63b
Gutter. ‘Fierce Pussy: Interview’. Artist Website. fierce pussy, 2009.
https://fiercepussy.org/interview.
Kelley, Mike, Catherine Wood, and Fiontán Moran, eds. Mike Kelley,
Ghost and Spirit. London: Tate, 2024.
Tate. ‘Turner Prize 2024 | Tate Britain’. Tate. Accessed 2 May 2025.
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/turner-prize-2024.
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