girls/ bodies/ aesthetics/ image/ place/ surface/ style/ futurity/ interiors/ iridescence/ material/ texture/ shimmer/ slit/ slime/ ice/ plastic/ slugs/ worms/ mould/ pleasure/ pop/ trash/ erotics/ love/ care/ resistance/
I am interested in writing through/with/about girlhoods in the way that McKenzie Wark said “In the language of identity, the girl has never been. She is the empty slot in a language defined by others” (Philosophy for Spiders) and in the way Johanna Hedva said “Language is fucking made of like blood with chunks in it.” (On Hell). This is the girl as image, projection, surface. McKenzie Wark continues, “in the absence of language, where the girl isn’t, could be many other possibilities,” – I speak of the possibility to escape, deceive, scintillate.
My writing brings an interdisciplinary range of voices together into dialogue; often borrowing from feminist philosophy and pop culture. This is to speak of intra-action, a term borrowed from Feminist New Materialisms, in reference to the ways things rub against each other, fizz, diffract and influence each other. This is to speak of what it is like to be wrapped in the world, how moving materially through it allows for a kind of theorizing, how this explores possibilities in place of absence.
My MA thesis, Notes Towards a Theory for Iridescence is an affective re-writing of the ways girlhood and iridescence intra-act, examining different worldings through texture. Femininity, queerness, and otherworldliness are brought together with textures of oil, crystal, and slime – also leaning on sci-fi and inhabiting the Greek goddess of the rainbow, Iris, as a character as she journeys to find her Blazing New World (borrowed from Margaret Cavendish’s 1666 novel of the same name).
My work is invested in alternative futures for femininity. My submission to ARC magazine, BODYMOVIEMACHINE critically examines post-disciplinary notions of intimacy and femininity through a chorus of voices. A convergence of three bodies across screen-flesh, throwing together multiplicity, skin, milk, a kiss, debris – possibility.
A final dimension to my practice examines how objecthood sits in dialogue with place, identity, work. A Portrait in Negative Space… and an evolution of this piece, Treatise on Mould, takes this on by drawing on other kinds of budding, ripening life. Eight Things, a partnership project with the Pitt Rivers Museum, places an archival image of a sundial in next to contemporary writing practice, whilst Jumbo’s Last Stand, an extended research piece, takes this in a different direction by exploring experimental feminist publishing methodologies.
Really, I like to point language, objects, that thing that happened in 2006, and weird acts of light at each other to suggest how we might together find Blazing New Worlds if we take the leap.
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Talismans:
Linda Stupart said This is the future, and the word has become a war cry. (Virus)
Johanna Hedva said Words are like like a sort of motion in themselves they can move things around they can get high up there and you in fact don’t have to wait for them at all that’s what those guys get so wrong. The words take you they just fucking go and bang that’s it and me fuck I want to go now ya I’m fucking sick of fucking waiting. That’s what this is all about that’s all you need to know or care about that I want to fly. (On Hell)
Audre Lorde said When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives. (Uses of the Erotic)
Tai Shani said They are forever on the cusp of realisation; familiar, yet extraordinary. They exist on the threshold between becoming and collapse. (Our Fatal Magic)
McKenzie Wark said You can’t change me because there’s nothing to change. I’ve never been. (Philosophy for Spiders)
Kathy Acker said We want to feed on your flesh. We want – we’re going to reproduce only girls by ourselves in the midst of your leftover cockhair, in your armpits, in whatever beards you have.” (My Mother: Demonology)
