So I set myself the task of trying to summarize what it is my work is about, the core beliefs if you will. It feels like it’s always in a state of formulation, the beast just keeps getting bigger and bigger.
There exist several characters that weave throughout my practice, I imagine they are kind of like the multiple John Malkovich’s, in the film of the same name, myself again and again; in drag, pregnant with sexuality, fornicating within internal abscesses, a reverse birth canal of abject arseholes.
My main character the Detective; explores my fantasies of masculinity and of coming to terms with my own femininity. The only ‘male’ in the story, although his lack is substituted with a bulging cock-sock lest his true gender be displayed, and his apparent masculinity called into question. Girls swoon in his presence, he only has to adjust the curve of wadded material and they moisten in anticipation. He is the super stud of my pubescent dreams, with the swagger that I always wanted to possess. In a family unit of misogynistic males, the role of the subordinate female was not within the grasp of my desire. I wanted to be the pandered male. I only understood sex as a projection of male desire. I began to develop a kind of simulated hermaphroditism, where I could be at once both male and female, existing in a constant state of in-between. I did not feel as if I was born into the wrong gender per se, nor did I feel I wanted to become a boy. I was a girl, but the freedom of masculinity and its ideals seemed to appeal to me more than what I perceived as femaleness. As puberty encroached, and I [b]loomed toward womanhood, the balance began to shift as my interaction with the world as a ‘female desired by men’ took on shape. I no longer held the masculine gaze, I was in the male gaze, where men do the looking and women are looked at. Images to be consumed. The make-believe characters within my hyperbolic narrative explore this journey, trying to order and make sense of what is it is to be fe-male, or anything in-between.
It has been over a year since I left the safe confines of the institution, almost a year since I sailed across the sea to the port of Amsterdam. After finishing my MFA – two years of intensity, with four years prior – I longed for a distance that could only be found with an ocean between us. Four months in I was all a-crawl within the dark depths of the Northern Sea, calling out like a siren in the night. But without the safety of the institutional cage I floundered without a life-vest. Like Rapunzel in her modern high-rise, I would stare down at the world, waiting for something to come and wake me out of my stupor, or is that Sleeping Beauty? They both translate to the fable I had created. Alas no prince came. So I began to dream of familiar climes, and clicked my heels three times “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home…”. And so I was home, with all the Bisto™ gravy I could ask for. But then, as always happens when you get what you think you want, you suddenly don’t want it so much anymore. I felt like I had opted for the easy landing. I can climb that tower for myself. So back I clicked, and down that tower I slowly climbed. So here I am a year on. I left the high-rise for a brown-stone, and the institution for the atelier. I still canoe back and forth between familiarity and Amsterdamned, but without the itch (I know there’s cream for that).
Now for the real work to begin to make work outside of the coop. Pushing myself outside of the realms of comfort, I have begun to make work on the move, between continents, underneath the tented arch of bedcovers sheathed in torch-light, under the watchful eye of a fellow passenger. I always felt I needed ‘stuff’ to make work, a safe haven from which to create. But I have learnt I can carry it with me in that little place inside my head, I will admit the studio helps to consolidate your thoughts, and is successful in enveloping you within its world, and I would never give up my studio for all the tulips in Holland, but I am liberated by my new found ability to crawl into this inner recess and create. I think writing has helped, all these long journeys with notebook in hand, using any stop gap as an excuse to narrate. Also owing to the collaboration that has ensued between Richard Taylor http://www.rich-taylor.co.uk/ and myself (Edinburgh – Amsterdam) that made viscous these perpendicular boundaries, where time and space have become a mutable blur in the landscape.
