(2024, live art, poetry, sculpture)
This piece was made in response to the pressures I feel as a queer non-binary person so people please, or to make myself as palatable as possible. I help so much fear around being disliked for my identity. I began to explore ways of breaking away from this fear by writing versions of my identity as an ‘evil supervillian’ character. I wanted to imagine a self that does not concern themselves with being perceived in a positive light. But then, as I started to explore the super villian alter ego I realised it was cruel, inconsiderate, and it was just slowly turning into the very thing that I am scared of now. So, this became my attempt to charter badness within myself, as well as the evil that is constantly being shaped and reshaped around us.
This poem is one of the pieces that came out of this experiment. This piece started with a poem that I wrote myself, which I melded into a kind of hanging ‘comic book’ piece with watercolour illustrations of the poem. The piece itself was cast in pewter that I collected and recycled in old pieces, using a mold that I hand cast using clay to accommodate the pieces of poem inside of it snuggly. I also developed a performance piece which I read the poem dressed as my evil alter ego, with a cape made up of over 3,000 pieces of jig saw. The performance piece was debuted at Cal De Cabaret, and the sculpture was exhibited at Spellbound MCR.
Georgie Brooke 