Introductions and creative practice pillars

I shared regular updates from my residency over at Blackpool Social Club. This first column introduces me and details the three pillars guiding my creative practice at that time: queer failure, daemonic creativity and making art in the void.

Queer saints and other inspirations

David Hoyle‘s artwork always leaves me in awe at how generous he is in sharing himself – in all his radical, resilient, charming and rebellious glory – so authentically and unapologetically with his audiences. His legacy is indisputable, and I owe him a massive debt of gratitude for what he so consistently models in his vision, self-trust, courage and tenacity. Attending his show Please Feel Free to Ignore My Work, along with a beautiful workshop from Travis Alabanza that was part of the Queer Amusements programme were both generative things to bounce off early in my residency.

Northward lies the road to hell

“In travel, art and literature, landscape became a way to commune with the people of the Viking Age – people who had seen the same red sun rising, felt the same cold wind on their necks, touched the same fissures in the smooth grey rock. This has in turn become a way to explore the mentality and world-view of a people with an intimate and profoundly imaginative relationship with the environment. For people living in the latter centuries of the first millennium, the landscape was teeming with unseen inhabitants and riddled with gateways to other worlds. Pits and ditches, barrows and ruins, mountains, rivers and forests: all could be home to the dead, the divine and the diabolical, haunted by monsters and gods.”

Viking history, local lore and Norse sorcery all evolved into unexpected research threads during my residency, and I wrote about them more in these two columns: haunted by monsters and gods, and Northwards lies the road to hell.

The dead, the divine and the diabolical

The dead, the divine and the diabolical was the culmination of my residency: a full-length performance staged as the final event of Queer Amusements. Featuring brand new spoken word material developed during the residency, sung vocals (!!!), soundscapes and some very special guests, it explored themes of finding home and family; untangling bloodlines and ancestral lineage; memory, grief, witchcraft, worship and what it means to be both divine and diabolical in places like Blackpool and beyond. An experimental showcase of a work-in-progress, the ideas and pieces in it are ones I hope to evolve and perform more in the hopefully-not-too-distant future.

Queers in Blackpool

It was a real joy and honoured to be featured in QUEERS IN BLACKPOOL, a short film by James Barnett documenting the first Queer Amusements festival, the people involved, the town it took place in, and what happens next.

Drawing from performance footage and interviews with participating artists and collaborators, the film is a beautiful insight into Blackpool’s queer scene, the people at the heart of it, and how Queer Amusements is bringing new art and ideas to one of the largest LGBTQ+ communities in the UK.