INVITATION
Let's drift along on a journey where I must use words for the indescribable, the unsayable. The presentation of this work involves a sensuous and sensual multi-layered reading, a braiding of images, poems, and academic language, allowing for a weaving between different ways of knowing along an unseen dimension.
Sex, desire, queerness, our bodies -, women’s bodies - have been veiled in darkness through religion and patriarchy (Lerner). The erasure of representation from a subjugated place and the suppression and oppression of our bodies have created a void in erotic embodiment and empowerment (Lorde). As a resistance to this removal of power, in my research and visual work, I depict our sapphic eroticism and the hidden dimension of pleasure in ways that have been forbidden to us. I move into a conceptual darkness to represent the subconscious and repressed elements relegated to the hidden, hushed, secret places, as well as to represent a safe space, a void, a receptive element, the abyss (Sandoval). We visit these places in the spirit of transformation (Anzaldúa) to connect with our erotic bodies, erotic power, queerness, sexuality, and pleasure. My work proposes a space to hold this receptive element (Le Guin) as a site of resistance in response to the forced removal of sexual power.
In the dark I make intersubjective (Tallbear) representations of the body, my body, her body, the sacred, the erotic, and sex. Our bodies become sites of investigation and resistance where sensuality, pleasure, and “the power of the erotic” are centred (Lorde). The materials of clay, film, resin, wax, salt, bronze are extensions of our earthly bodies and sexuality. The language of nature easily becomes abstraction and metaphor. Gushing, scissoring, dripping, fountains, pussy to pussy sex, pussy to mouth, breast, hands - these are radical representations because they are not abstraction. This is my purposeful representation of what had to go into hiding. I am reclaiming associations with the serpent as a symbol of women's sexual power, free female sexuality, queer sex, and snake on snake. The snake travels into the darkness, the underworld, to find the erotic. Two serpents form an infinity loop, wrestling, sliding, with their mouths swallowing each other - the abyssal braid. The serpent represents pleasure for our liberation (brown), generating iconography for our sexually autonomous cult baptized in darkness.
This research focuses on the power of the erotic in our bodies and how that erotic power is shared by our bodies in relation to the physical world. This research prioritizes an endogenous, pleasureful method that shifts the intellectual dominance of ‘rational’ thought as the sole mode of expression and knowing, and that poetically drifts with concepts of the dark, void, intimacy, and intersubjectivity. These theoretical propositions think along with and are inspired by earlier feminist scholarship. Looking towards Audre Lorde’s essay The Uses of the Erotic, Erotic as Power and adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism, and feminists Gloria Anzadúla, Chela Sandoval, and Ursula Le Guin, we return pleasure to the centre for building knowledge, personal agency, and collective resistance. We create a space to honour our erotic bodies, and to resist patriarchy, phallocentrism, and the imperialist image and imagination.
DARKNESS
Below the surface is a good place to start. This work, the writing, and art, have come from the dark.
The darkness is a conceptual place that I return to over and over again in this research. In the darkness, I am plunged into emptiness. In “The Coatlicue State,” a chapter in Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa travels to a place where the body is arrested in an altered state of consciousness, a place that is dark and unknown. In this chapter, the serpent is Anzaldúa’s familiar and operates as a metaphor to navigate the “underground aspect” (Anzaldúa) of the psyche. In the darkness, time moves slowly, and all activity is below the surface. Anzaldúa writes, “by keeping the conscious mind occupied or immobile, the germination work takes place in the deep, dark earth of the unconscious” (Anzaldúa). Descending into the subterranean subconscious with the serpent familiar, “The Coatlicue State” allows for a place to wrestle with unresolved parts of ourselves for transformation. This is where shifts in identity and representation are seeded, and insist on space to emerge.
Anzaldúa’s “The Coatlicue State” shares a sympathetic relationship with the darkness that is reflected in my work. Though I can’t speak to the aspects of a racialized experience in America, I can relate to her experience of the dark feelings coming from a queer experience, her experience with religion, and as a neurodivergent outsider. The darkness is challenging but not negative; as Anzaldúa writes, "the dualism of light/darkness did not arise as a symbolic formula for morality until primordial darkness had been split into light and dark” (Anzaldúa 71). In my work, the snake symbolizes the power of women’s sexuality, and there is also a wrestling with the darkness that the snake represents. I am making a connection with the darkness, women's sexuality, the serpent and the unknown void of dark matter.
CARRIER BAG / VOID
The patriarchal story of the hero, the strong male main character is dissolved and held in a feminine universe, in a view from women's perspective. There is no straight path of the hero’s arc, no climax, no crescendo. There is no final destination or goal. Instead, it is “heroically free” (Lispector 10). It is not meant to be exclusive but a point of opposition and expansion to the dominant discourse told from the male point of view. Within this form of non-linear worldbuilding, as a mode of storytelling, we can non-literally write new possibilities, alternative preferred realities. In this work, the carrier bag is a receptacle, an existential site for sapphic stories. A paradigm where power is located in the dark, receptive element - pussy.
“We've heard it, we've all heard about all the sticks, spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained ”(LeGuin). In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula LeGuin proposes an alternate structure for a work of fiction, a bag. She configures elements inside the bag as a way to “reorganize, reconstitute, retell, recreate world-ings for new possibilities” (Haraway). That is the intention of this space, this paper, the exhibition: a container to hold—a receptive element.
We begin with a carrier bag, the void, a container that holds potential, we transform the form of the gallery into the receptive element. Conceptually, we transform the gallery space into an imagined garden of paradise with iconography of our interiority, intersubjectivity, and pleasure. It is an altar to our bodies, a Parallel Paradise. This allows the concept of paradise to exist within and around us. This bag/exhibition/thesis contains all the makings of paradise, intimacy, the body, and communication with the more than human realm. It contains a relationship between elements, a carrier bag/void set with the iconography of snakes, fountains, trees, fruit, and pussy. This is our story of the garden of paradise.
Layers of the feminine soften as we reconsider the story from this point of view: our own. Imagination and desire conjure a world into being that sapphics can enter into and see themselves in. We reclaim this story; our creation stories look queer and gushing. In this version we are all main characters; when it comes to our bodies and power women are the sole owners of their sexual liberty, autonomy, and sovereignty.
INTERSUBJECTIVITY / EROTIC ECOLOGY
The clay presses into the tree, and the tree speaks back to the clay. There is a two-way relationship between tree and clay. I acknowledge the romance of reciprocal relationship between myself and the more-than-human realm. I investigate these intersubjective relationships with metaphors for multidirectional communication. I explore repositioning power between subjects, and I delink relationships from hierarchy; each person, tree, piece of clay, is a subject. This creates an opportunity to dissolve the hierarchy of the subject-object orientation of the male gaze. When we are communicating subject to subject, that hierarchy is diffused. The perspective of Intersubjectivity, with a method considering the intimacy of materials, has allowed for intimacy of people when we encounter the work and each other.
The idea of intimate relations with the more-than-human world is not new. It has been a way of knowing and being of Indigenous worldviews like the Dakota peoples near where I am from. In an episode of the podcast For the Wild (Young), Kim Tallbear shares her Dakota perspective on intersubjectivity, a two-way relationship with humans and more-than-humans built into the Dakota language. She speaks about the non-hierarchical relationship between humans and nature. I see it also in the pagan worlds of Ireland, although that topic is beyond this project's scope. It is a form of knowledge the settler colonial project seeks to erase.
RECIPROCITY / MULTIPLE ORGASMS
The exposure is a decisive moment analogous to orgasm. Multiple exposures are analogous to multiple orgasms. In the Snake Swallows Snake photo series and Held Up by the G-Spot Fountain photo series , film photos explore the concept of reciprocity in multiple exposures.
In the dark of night, while the flowers bloom in the trees of High Park, I shine a burst of expanded energy: a flash, which collects the contrast of the flowers with the darkness on a small piece of emulsion. I rewind the frame and when I open the shutter again, the film adjusts to make one shared image with two different perspectives, like when the river widens as two meet. The 35mm film emulsion undergoes a process of reciprocity, where the exposure is made in relationship to two different views, and sometimes more—another perspective on top of this one. While the springtime flowers bloom, the hibernaculum of garter snakes awaken along the bank of Ward’s Beach with their queer pheromone-driven ritual. I layer this onto the same small piece of emulsion, and the two perspectives are joined.
These photos speak to an ongoing transformation of women’s sexuality that takes place in the darkness.
My practice in analogue photography takes a feminine approach. I do not emphasize focus, clarity, containment, order, or “proper” exposure—it is my intentional decision to challenge this medium that is focused on the “correct” technique.