ABOUT

Extract from Auto-interview # 9 – More object translations from recent research

Interviewer: So, what has your recent research been focussed on?

Interviewee: Primarily it was around ideas of queerness, queering and the archive. My work frequently has an historical edge to it and so I have done a lot of research on queerness since Stonewall. It became apparent to me that this linear narrative of queer history has been created and somehow become accepted. But in some cases, this history feels at odds with my own memory. Sarah Schulman discusses this process in her book The Gentrification of the mind.

But also, this divergence of memory and history highlights the instability of the archive; that the past is not fixed. And if the past is not fixed then nor is the future. The most stimulating reading around this for me has been around Jose Esteban Munoz’s theory of queer futurity; that the archive can be used to activate the potentiality of the past, by using glimpses from the past to critique the present to desire different futures.

Also related to this, I guess, are ideas around a sort of queer inheritance and how this is transmitted between non-biological generations and also the liberal assimilation of queerness into mainstream society, essentially the straightening out of queerness, through legalising marriage etcetera.

Interviewer: Those are big topics. How are they reflected in the work?

Interviewee: These topics fundamentally underpin the work I have made, but it has really made me aware how important artifacts from the queer archive, the idea of the archive and a queered archival process are to my work.

So, the uncovering and piecing together of fragments, from queer fiction by Edmund White and Andrew Holleran or queer photographers like Peter Hujar and Alvin Baltrop has given me an insight into queer history. But it has also made me consider what might be missing, the individual histories that go undocumented. So, part of my work is about allowing myself and the viewer to create their own narrative based on what is found and the influence of our own histories. It’s about creating a personal intimacy by inserting yourself within this historical context.

But it is also about acknowledging that the archive is constantly evolving and changing. New artifacts from the past are found and new artifacts from the present are added.

My whole practice has become, in a way, a slightly queered archival process. I’ve started creating an archive of images; work by other artists, images of things I see in the street and of the things I make. They are all printed on index cards about 15cm by 10cm and filed in trays in a wooden box. But I also use the cards to create kind of mind maps; to visually piece together my ideas, my influences, how the work has developed and where it might go.

Even these documents of my own internal dialogue, around the ideas and processes behind my work, expressed as these fictional “auto-interviews”, become a queered artifact in my archive. It’s a way of recording the process, but it’s also a fundamental part of the process, helping me to work out what is going on in my head.