People often think clowns are hiding behind their makeup, costumes, and performance but I think it's the opposite. Clowning is about exaggeration, it reveals what we already are- they take what exists and make it bigger, happier, sillier, sadder. I am a transgender multidisciplinary artist; my practice is informed by my experience of mental and chronic illness. I am my own subject matter: Insanity as source material. My performance is every day, dressing up and doing makeup keeps me alive. I document myself because I want to be loud and queer, I want to be small and soft, I want to be vulnerable and rough.
Endurance Performance 12 - 24 years old, 2022. 13 photographs 18 cm x 28 cm. single channel video 1:44.
I'm interested in exploring queer identity through performance. For this project I choose my body as a site to investigate. A starting place for this research was the question "how has the site been photographed historically?". I delved into my personal photo archives; I have a 12-year collection of polaroid photos of myself. It begun with a Fuji Film Instax camera I bought when I was 12 years old - I still use the same camera today.
Now 24, I looked through my collection and curated a photo from each year, each photo capturing my sense of self at the time. I morph through adolescence and into adulthood. I experimented with scale and decided to scan and enlarge the photos. To subvert the recognisable small size that polaroids have. I chose gloss paper to match the shine of the original images and kept the original size ratio. There are two years missing from my collection: When I first moved out of home and couldn't afford the film. That space of emptiness felt important, so I used the back of polaroids to signify it.
Now 24, I looked through my collection and curated a photo from each year, each photo capturing my sense of self at the time. I morph through adolescence and into adulthood. I experimented with scale and decided to scan and enlarge the photos. To subvert the recognisable small size that polaroids have. I chose gloss paper to match the shine of the original images and kept the original size ratio. There are two years missing from my collection: When I first moved out of home and couldn't afford the film. That space of emptiness felt important, so I used the back of polaroids to signify it.
