Queer Reproduction: Horror, Landscape and Myth

This practice research project considers the connections and intersections of the supernatural, queerness, and art making that speculates queer futures and communities. The project began with an exploration of ghost stories and their connection to repressed sexuality and identity, and mediumship and its relationship to gender transgression. These explorations revealed how art making can embody supernatural queer male birth, and I utilised feminist theory to suggest allegorical modes of alternative birth. Through my specific and personal connection to a geographic location - the Lincolnshire Fens in the UK - liminality, landscape, a wealth of folklore and a connection to queerness, politics, and the queer body’s relationship to the land are central to this project. I claim these spaces as queer and interpreted their political and historical contexts as such. This landscape provided me with opportunities for ethnographic practice through storytelling and site-specific performance, documentation of which forms part of this project. My collaborations with other performance artists garnered further insights into kinship and alternative forms of community. For example, when co-producing work for this project in Taiwan, I explored tangible queer spirituality and object relationships. Working in a transdisciplinary manner, I have produced charged and evocative time-based media artworks using methods of creation related to mediumship and the supernatural, and in particularly: performance, sculpture, drawing, and AI text and animation woven into installations. In this project, I propose queer futures that challenge hegemony, examine queer identity, and celebrate the downright weird.