I'm a writer, performer and artist who lives and works on unceded Gadigal Land, originally from unceded Ngunnawal and Ngambri Land. I see my various mediums as part of the one practice - I'm currently doing my Masters in Fine Arts looking at long-form text as a performative, fine art medium. My practice has always been interested in subculture - often spinning worlds around queerness, punk and spooky stuff. I'm focused on the lives of outsiders. I like my writing to inhabit a slippery place between the personal, the essayistic, and fiction. The key research I'm currently undertaking for my masters uses this mode, by combining both my artistic work and my academic thesis into a single book. The project is about imagining the possibilities of the screenplay as a readerly, literary form, as opposed to its function as blueprint to make a movie. It means that the text then performatively conjures a movie that isn't really there, another slippery in-between space. This relates to parallel work I'm doing, obsessed with circular forms and impossible space. Around a period of grief about a year ago, strangely flattened and deferred by COVID resulting in my inability to mourn with my family, I found myself becoming fixated on Darby Crash - singer of iconic, early punk band Germs, who was a closeted gay man and died at age 24. I poured my grief into imagining he was a ghost I could relate to, but also help soothe in place of myself.

FORMING is a poem about a performance. My uncle was an artist who took me to galleries, bought me books about art, edited my thesis, cooked me dinner, introduced me to arthouse cinema. It feels like I'm overstating, but I wouldn't be who I am without his influence. I didn't see him over the two year period where his brain cancer slowly killed him. He finally died, and I wanted to try work through my feelings, but the idea of writing about my uncle's ghost, imagining I could see him again, felt too silly.

I'm compelled by "failure" and Darby's inability to be gay in punk, those two worlds cancelling each other out and making him an internal mess, made me sympathetic for him. I felt like he was a worse version of myself, so maybe I could grieve for him, embodying who I felt I was, but he was dead like my uncle too. He was a conduit between countless things, becoming my plaything. FORMING then is an imagined performance where we work through our feelings.

I have an exhibition next year expanding on my work around Darby Crash.