This practice-led artistic research project responds to the question of how queerness can be brought to form sculpturally, without using bodily figuration or other tropes historically associated with the category of Queer Art. The project looks to an abstracted, below-surface, skeletal, material queer as a propositional alternative to an explicitly legible, annunciatory queer. These conditions define a critical position that rejects figural, didactic and overtly legible representations of queer identity as being simultaneously lacking, constrictive and reductive. Queer abstraction is proposed instead as an alternative mode due to its radical openness and subversive relation to fixed signifiers of personhood.
The sculptural archetype of the figure-in-the-round is isolated as the arena for the critical investigation of bodily representation and the politics of such figuration. This research explores which bodies, today and throughout history, have been represented as figures-in-the-round, asking in what manner and in the production of which socio-spatial relations are these representations directed.
andrew.atchison@gmail.com
