As a researcher, I am compelled by the complexities of perspectives surrounding the environment and how to experiment with our relationship with the non-human world. Centred on exploring and expanding the notion of queer ecologies, my work seeks to decipher, dissect, and reformulate intimacies with both organic and inorganic materials as the foundation for new ecological paradigms to arise.
Recently I have developed these interests into new educational platforms through the establishment of CLAW (Collaborative Learning in Art n’ Wildness) as a youth-centred offshoot of my arts collective Tooth n’ Fang, which is situated on the Pearson College UWC campus; the traditional territories of the Sci’anew (Beecher Bay) First Nation.
This initiative is designed to explore and experiment with non-human reverences towards local native species of Vancouver Island as stimulus for new creative and collaborative projects to develop, including the recent production of A Chorus of Immortal Toxins which will have its world premiere at the Prague Quadrennial festival in Czechia 2023.
In 2017-2019, I attended York University to pursue my Masters in Sustainable Design for the Performing Arts. While educating myself on the ecological impacts of art making, I was drawn to both the environmental and symbolic affect of plastic bags as a pollutant but also a reverent object of theoretical and practical experimentation.
My graduate thesis, The Funeral, thrust plastic into the performative forefront as I remade the body of my late grandmother from plastic bags and enacted a queer Catholic funeral service for the object. Entangling performance art, sculpture, and live theatre, the synthetic human body became a catalyst for personal narratives of grief and mourning to emerge and evolve.
For more information, or to read the full text:
The Object / The Body / The Ritual: An affectual dissection of plastic bags through performance design
