Desire and Disgust - an exploration of hunger
Though most of my work this year has been majorly interested in childhood, the making of my zine “Pink Tiger Reflections” encouraged me to explore the struggles I faced as a teenager and how they have shaped my identity today. Many of the poems I illustrated in the zine discuss my turbulent relationship with my body following the eating disorder I had as a teen. What interested me in particular was the way my sexuality and my eating disorder intertwined. The more I discovered my desires, the more I became disgusted with myself. The gay community can be shallow and toxic, making you feel like your body is all you can offer. If it isn’t perfect, you have no value. There is a real problem with the over-sexualisation of gay men, especially those who are under/just-of age, which is often a reaction to loneliness and craving validation. This project encompasses the sad reality that my teenage experience of queerness was ultimately defined by hunger. Morbid Fascination
Single-Use Plastic - video
I ONLY FEEL SEXY WHEN MY RIBS ARE SHOWING
For these pieces, I wanted to create a feeling of rawness- violent brushstrokes, unstretched canvas like skin, messy and human and wild. “I ONLY FEEL SEXY WHEN MY RIBS ARE SHOWING,” my first large-scale oil painting, features my body bent into a frankly painful position in a desperate attempt to be “sexy.” The reference picture was taken while I was struggling with my body image after a breakup. I had been unwillingly launched back into single life and wanted so badly to feel wanted again. I was driven by the need to prove to him that I was thriving despite the brutal way he discarded me. I started having casual sex and spent an ungodly amount of time on Grindr. I felt disgusting. I loaned my body to people and felt like the single-use plastic condoms they used. And I took nudes constantly. Fast-food, fast-fashion, fast-bodies, fast-sex, fasting. I stopped eating (again) because I had lost control and I wasn’t sexy enough and I couldn’t see my ribs unless I twisted and contorted and HURT. “Single-Use Plastic” was a poem I wrote at the time. The second painting, “Morbid Fascination,” continues my exploration of masculinity. I pose in front of the mirror over and over again, first sucking in my stomach, then flexing my muscles. Making myself as small as possible then immediately trying to be big. A vicious cycle of distortion until I no longer have any idea what I’m looking at but I can’t pull my eyes away. Tracey Emin’s recent exhibition, “I Followed You to the End,” encouraged me to confront these scathing feelings in such an open way. The act of working on these large-scale paintings of my body in the studio where anyone could see them was a painfully vulnerable process. Emin’s own work exposes a battle with her body that feels almost invasive to see. She paints in a ruthlessly expressive way that makes each piece feel like an open wound. Then, she leaves it undressed to show the world how she bleeds. This is the raw emotiveness I want to capture in my own work.
Working on a video piece was an entirely new challenge. I wanted to capture the surreal feeling of having a stranger in your own bed, in your own body. Familiar things become unfamilar, taken over by a foreign life-form. It is my bed, but inviting YOU in, instead. My sheets, but I’m gripping them in a way I never usually would. My face, but so close...I’m just a mouth. My breath, but hard and fast. My throat. Kissed, bruised, bitten, fucked. Samuel Beckett’s “Not I” creates discomfort through the disjointed reading of his poem from a mouth that seems to belong to a void of darkness. This encouraged me to combine my poetry with film.
Working on a video piece was an entirely new challenge. I wanted to capture the surreal feeling of having a stranger in your own bed, in your own body. Familiar things become unfamilar, taken over by a foreign life-form. It is my bed, but inviting YOU in, instead. My sheets, but I’m gripping them in a way I never usually would. My face, but so close...I’m just a mouth. My breath, but hard and fast. My throat. Kissed, bruised, bitten, fucked. Samuel Beckett’s “Not I” creates discomfort through the disjointed reading of his poem from a mouth that seems to belong to a void of darkness. This encouraged me to combine my poetry with film.