“Nature held me close and seemed to find no fault with me.” - Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg
During my recovery from my 2nd brain surgery in 2023, I suffered intense migraines, creating altered, disoriented states sometimes disconnected from reality, resulting in a longing and need for spaces of protection and belonging. In these sculptures I’m using my queer identity to think about queer utopias and gay fantasy spaces I’d like to inhabit.
Grottos are often considered places of reflection/meditative, a creation of one’s own natural habitat or a parallel ecosystem. They pull the viewer into a world that is not quite their own, filled with imagination and playfulness. Taking inspiration from ancient garden grottos, my own sculptures become magical escapes, where your mind and eyes can wander throughout and around, finding your favorite crevices or desires, accompanied by mermaid tails and double headed swan lawn ornaments in this queer curtilage fantasy.
Clay works as a material that is both domestic and organic/natural at its root, often with personal values represented. Handbuilding allows for a spontaneity and imperfection of touch that I am drawn to. These pieces are handbuilt with clay and influenced by the punk and queer movements. There is also some clay piping in the details of the large grotto piece. Curves reference the organic natural world, water, and the female body. The curvy forms have multiple meanings- the ruffles look like brain corals, waves, tumors, female forms, ruffled feathers - power of resistance and voice.
All pieces encourage the viewer to bend down, or look closer, similar to the early ideas of the grotesque and grotto:
“[The grotto] is earthy and material, a cave, an open mouth that invites our descent into other worlds. It is a space where the monsters and marvels of our imagination are conceived. While the grotesque pulls us beyond the boundaries of the world we know, it also reminds us of our limits and our own mortality.”
· The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture - The Image at Play - By Frances S. Connelly
The grotto functions like a portal into Queer joy. There is an unforgiving/ unyielding hard edge to the expectation of softness from the ruffled exterior, traveling up and around and down into a fantasy cave world of hope, joy, love, acceptance, enveloped by sensual organic lines all around. The ruffled curves mimic organic forms of nature, while the double headed swans and cats, and mermaid tails present a parallel natural world, and queer landscape, creating alternative spaces, and personalizing our own parallel ecosystem. Each view has the possibility for new interpretation, similar to new neural pathways forming after brain surgery. I’m referencing the personal symbolism of undergoing two brain surgeries to remove tumors, finding beauty and strength in the ugly and terrifying, along with various states of life and decay.
Along with these grottos are mermaid tails, oversized seashells, and double headed swan lawn ornaments that surprise and dazzle. Mermaid tails and double headed swans strewn about and popping out of the lawn disorient and challenge the viewer- do they live in the woods too? Do mermaids also swim underground?? These queer references hold messages of joy and resistance during a time when the government is trying to silence queer voices and history through actions like removing LGBTQ content from government websites, restricting LGBTQ-related data collection, rolling back nondiscrimination protections and limiting discussions about LGBTQ issues in schools through book bans. The grotto sculpture offers a sense of belonging, joy, acceptance, and a little magic in a time we all need it. I want these sculptures to hold space for whatever is needed in that moment, offering a suspension of disbelief. We live in a magical, mysterious, anguishing world full of twists and turns. With a crackdown on LGBTQ+ rights and history we need resistance and revolt more than ever.