Restrictive movement & the gender-queer body
my mental art studio
Okay, so,
Consider this a brain dump from a place of ongoing curiosity. I did mean it when I said this newsletter would be a mental art studio of sorts…anyway…
Here are the basics:
I’ve been investigating the gender queer body through my photographic practice for a few months now. To me, my body is a fluid form, a medium for my conscious to move through and experience life in, that doesn’t fit into gender binaries. I realised I can try and communicate this feeling through my art, reshaping the way we look at and experience ‘the body’ in our day-to-day. With this in mind, I began to develope a photographic portrait series, where I portray the body in abstract, exaggerated silhouettes that accentuated shapes, lines and forms.
I love the patterns that I created with the body in these series, as well as the large bodily ‘landscapes’. I enjoyed zooming in to the point where the body and it’s position needed to be actively recognised by spending a bit of time with the photographs.
What I didn’t realise at the time was that in beginning this investigation I was un-restricting the body from the societal confines of ‘regular’ and therefore recognisable poses and movements.
I was recently diagnosed with ASD which has opened my eyes to the way I mask not only my emotions but also the way I move and express my physical body. This has sent me down a rabbit hole of investigating acceptable body language in both personal and professional settings and… woah.
Gender expression aside, this notion of an ‘appropriate’ body language for public settings is deeply unsettling to me. From posture to hand gestures, our free will and body autonomy have been and continue to be governed in our daily lives. Most people conform to these unspoken rules from birth without consideration, conversation, or passing thought. It’s disturbing, especially as someone who has never been tuned in to these unspoken rules, instead having to painstakingly learn them as an adult.
So, I began to dig deeper into how our society governs the way we use and move our bodies, and how we conform to these restrictions in every day settings to access certain spaces, through a queer lens. As laws begin to further dictate and limit access to healthcare for people with specific body parts, it seems incredibly relevant to start a conversation here.
After a bit more reading and practice in studio, I made a nude self portrait series where I posed in energetic, exaggerated ways with an emphasis on creating shapes and lines that lean towards abstraction. I isolated myself in the studio, focusing on mid-action movements like running, jumping, and spinning. Inspired by my previous shoot, I used harsh backlighting to create silhouettes of myself with minimal, high contrast highlights. As the lights reflected off my bare skin it ate away at parts of my body, blurring the boundaries between the body and background.
FYI the following photographs contain nudity:
The photographs have a quiet sense of movement which I love. The erasure and reshaping of my body by highlighting shape, line, and forms, remove emphasis from the body parts themselves and instead enhancing the energy of my movements.
I was alone with the camera in an environment entirely different to my day to day existence: in the dark, on a cyclorama, completely nude. I was blasting Blood Sugar Sex Magic by the chili peppers. That album has always made me move, jump, and jerk. It gave my limbs back their autonomy and helped detach my mind from the camera, and the world, between shots.
Unpacking restrictive movements in photography is not a new concept, especially in feminist art theory. I’m interested in how this relates to the gender queer body specifically. Perhaps the neurodivergent body, in the future. To investigate and further dismantle these restrictions, I’m consistently dissecting and observing movements I see in my daily life and environments. The art practice never starts and ends, really.
I want to tie this into explorations I’ve been doing in drawing with shadow and light. Our shadow self is our forever companion, walking beside us, not quite a mirror. I’ve been connecting to this ‘me’ through projector play, magic lantern drawing techniques, and bodily movement. I’m hoping I can marry these two interests to conceptually inform one another. Photography has always been light and shadow, after all.
This is an experiment, incorporating performance art / video work. I have no prior experience in film, videography, or performance. This is entirely new and so far I’m loving using my body in this way.
Experimental Performance video is the next step towards uniting my past investigations. It was completely intuitive and I had no plan in place. To me, it’s quite uncanny in it’s movements and has an awkward momentum, but, there’s a longing to connect with this shadow of mine that I can’t quite reach out and touch.
One of my inspirations was Shigeko Kubota’s 1965 Vagina Painting performance. With her in mind, I might extend this investigation into performative drawing / making in the next phase of experiments… maybe even lean into abjection? We’ll see…
I don’t have as much to say on this for the moment but I will have more context for these videos in time as I continue learning.
More recently, I engaged with sonography in my personal life. It reminded me very much of my shadow and light play experiments, specifically the magic lantern technique used in Shadow Play which I talked about earlier. I guess the microscopic elements of the magic lanterns have similar visual characteristics to the images and videos produced by sonography (?). I’m hoping to incorporate some of my scans into this exploration, as viewing my internal body through sonographs felt very dehumanising in a way I’m familiar with as a non binary person.
Sigh. I love the places art can take you.
Thank you for accompanying my brain on this creative roller coaster. It’s almost been a year since my first investigation into the body, and I have a feeling it will stick around, evolving in the years to come. More (cohesive) writing coming soon.
Thanks for reading, stay mindful.