Strange Bodies 2018

My work is interdisciplinary, using both painting and sculpture to create non-representational biomorphic forms. I use colour and form to convey the grotesque, as a way to examine notions of race, beauty, femininity and ways of being in the world as an intersectional feminist woman of colour.

Strange Bodies, 2018, creates an experience not unlike Alice falling down a rabbit-hole to Wonderland. However unlike Alice, these bodies and forms cannot escape their Wonderland and are continually asked to identify themselves.

Sara Ahmed argues that there is, ‘no body as such that is given in the world : bodies materialise in a complex set of temporal and spatial relations to other bodies, including bodies that are recognised as familiar, familial and friendly, and those that are considered strange’. (Ahmed, 2000).

I am interested in exploring how and why some bodies are defined as ‘strange,’ and as according to Ahmed, how this can morph into perceived stranger danger or violent strangers. This work explores how these concepts may be embodied in large forms, forms that are ‘strange,’ and recognised by the viewer as looking unlike ‘you’. Strange Bodies also considers that these forms are standing and occupying space within a very white place; a white cube, within an education institution that stands on unceded sovereign Aboriginal land.

MADA NOW Exhibition November 2018