Notes on Queerness is an exhibition denoting aspects of what it is to be queer. Bringing together queer voices exploring a multitude of themes including sexual intimacy, shame and personal identity. Using the gallery space as an experimental forum allowing the artists’ to express their own experiences, to speak and to be heard, the public are also invited to interact with an ever changing wall exploring their own thoughts on queerness through contributing personal ephemera.

Travis Alabanza

is a performance artist, theatre maker, poet and writer that works and survives in London, via Bristol. Their multidisciplinary practice uses a combination of poetry, theatre, soundscapes, projection and body-focussed performance art to scream about their survival as a Black, trans, gender-non-conforming person in the UK. Growing up on a council estate on the outskirts of a city, Travis prides themselves on a practice that is messy, abrupt, confrontational, atypical and self-taught, often using performance to provoke a strong emotion [and action] from their audience. In the last two years Travis has cemented themselves as one of the most prominent emerging queer artists in the UK (As noted by Dazed, Prancing Through Life and MOBO) and has performed, talked and toured across numerous UK venues as well as internationally to acclaimed reviews.

Emily Pope

is an artist based in London, interested in the currency of sociopolitical and/or feminist monologues and how pain can be manipulated through humour, and presented virtually. She makes t-shirts, bags, audio and film and also writes and does readings. Recent exhibitions and projects include: ASP, ICA London; Feral Kin, Auto Italia, London; The Court Summons, Ladette Space, London; Tarantellegra, Hester, New York and together with Ruth Angel Edwards: Got 2 B, a radio show on Resonance FM. It seems she has now been kicked off the radio, which may be her own fault due to abysmal timekeeping and swearing on air, so she has archived the project on the internet. Emily has a Masters in Critical Writing from the Royal College of Art, and studied at the School of the Damned, a free postgraduate art course run by and for its students.

Alexander Glass

A towel falls, a body emerges from steam and drips over the impermeable floor…

Through his sculptural installations, Alexander explores the separation between images and reality in spaces commonly associated with the potent male body. In scenarios which first appear seductive and idyllic, Alexander reveals their implied horrific potential with traces of violence and catastrophe. The swimming pool, the gym, and the locker-room showers are frequently used as legitimising scenarios for the cinematic lens to objectify the male body. Whilst these spaces symbolise physical strength and beauty, they also leave the subject exposed within their sterility; a sterility which is precarious and constantly vulnerable to corruption through the arrival of an abject material. Alexanders’ work explores the distance between the erotic and horrific through re-presentation of common cinematic tropes of seduction and the physical imagery that is inseparable from them. Familiar objects and images of desire become distorted through subverted materials and insinuated intention.

…the glass smashes, limbs freeze and the fluid runs thick.

Jake Moore

is an artist and curator based in Nottingham, UK. In an increasingly ubiquitous technological climate, his practice envisions a hybrid body; an intentional evolution of the body with technology. Arising from the relationship that he holds with a body both queer and in possession of a rare, chronic autoimmune condition, his work considers the potential that digital space can provide in progressing beyond corporeal limitations. Performance, video and computer animation are employed to construct an idealised, virtual body; a labour towards a machine-like perfection in form, surface, and movement as a method of regaining agency over his sick, living body. He questions, however, at what point the body’s progression might become polluted, stalling within a denaturalised redundancy; a machine pain. As his inquiry stems from a place of illness, he is interested in breaking the technological facade that he has worked to construct.