The Handled & The Laboured, 2022

The installation forms part of ongoing research into representations and performances of class and gender, with particular reference to overlaps of working classness and queerness.

In the installation, images of the hands of two women rest on the surfaces and edges of a table; spilling out of the containment of the box they are placed in. The women sit at the same table, are separated by a generation, and racialised differently in the world.

The wall-mounted photograph offers a parallel objectified image of working-class masculinity, that rests under the gaze in a frozen moment.

The play between normative gender roles -- active and passive positions, masculinity and the feminine -- are complicated by the refusal to focus on, or present, either faces or the phallus. The materials and hierarchies of display both reinforce and question notions of value under patriarchy and class. Each of the bodies that are present in this work -- all members of the same working-class family -- both handle and labour; are both handled and laboured.

The work utlises modes of both staged and vernacular photography, archival and copyshop printing techniques, and digital and analogue image capture, to consistently destablize given expectations and assumptions.

Installation comprised of giclée print mounted on alu-dibond (120cm x 80cm), x2 laserjet prints (21cm x 29.7cm each), and black card box (22.9cm x 32.4cm x 3.5cm).
Edition of 5 plus 1 AP.

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An Empire: A Performance-in-Print in 7 Acts