Proposal for Stain the Sheets

Theory

The project I would like to undertake over the course of this residency is tentatively titled Stain the Sheets (at least partly in dedication to an excellent exhibit entitled Burn the Sheets which I had the honour of attending last summer at House of Annetta. Curated and organised by my extremely talented friend Sam Godfrey, this was a transformational group show about trans domesticity and housing inequality which solidified my hope of pursuing an arts education – and transitioning).

The goal of this project is to traverse the most intimate details of queer domestic life through the impact bodies leave upon the spaces they habituate. After years of steady pressure of head-upon-pillow, the indent remains, even when the bed is fallow. This is an investigation into the afterglow of bodies once present; bodies which linger well into their absence; an inquiry into how empty spaces become imbued with ghosts. No human space is truly neutral, they are haunted by memory.

The history of queer lives is often contingent upon these hauntings. In the absence of clear documentation (beyond court records, whereby care becomes criminalized), evidence of queer encounters, which may have taken place in domiciled secrecy, unsanctified by the formality of a marriage record, or in the form of fleeting encounters on cruising grounds of pseudo-anonymity, hauntology become vitally important.

There may be no blue plaque present at Brompton Cemetry or the “Fuck Tree” on Hampstead Heath, but these remain places pregnant with phantasms of queer lives lived. Much ink has been spilled over the spectral significance of these publicly charged locations (Muñoz, O’Mullane, Edelman, to name a few) but my project aims to walk home from the cruising ground in favour of nebulous sapphic domesticity. Over the course of this project I will be working with the traces of private intimacy, to create something as brazenly public as the Vauxhall Unionals.

Praxis

The project will begin by collecting disused (old, perhaps stained by time) bed sheets and associated stories of the domestic from across LGBTQAI+ networks, ironing them out, and working out how these tales weave together to form a complex tapestry of queer lived experience. With the explicit consent and collaborative involvement from participants, I will make a series of sketches or ‘plan drawings’ translating these orally transmitted histories into visual representations, snapshots that offer a fleeting glimpse of lives at their most vulnerable, curled up in beds, sofa, a friends floor, at rest or asleep.

Then, I will take the largest sheet in the collection (‘vestige sheet’), cut the fitted seams so it lies flat and affix it to the studio wall; where it will remain until the culmination of this project.

From here, I will add the next seam-cut sheet, and begin to trace the outlines of the bodies which once lay there. Focusing on where the fabric is most worn and curving outwards to mark the contours of bodies at rest.

I have a unique and deeply recognisable style to my figures, one which cuts across oil paintings, sculpture and installation work. The same Moore-ish and Lempicka-esque forms will lay down upon these sheets as I get to work giving corporality to the ghosts that lurk amongst the threads. As the material I will be working on is thin (either cotton or linen) and unstretched I will be opting to use gouache paint in favour of my usual oil, which may be too heavy for these ghostly sheets. I will also be working in my signature colour palette of ochres and oranges, with flushes of carmine to echo the flag of my many sapphic participants in this project.

I will produce as many of these bedsheet paintings as I can over the course of the residency, but the number I am aiming for is twelve, each showcasing a different moment of queer relationality and family structure.

After completing this series, and all the painted sheets have been neatly folded, I will be left with just the vestige sheet. A confusing overlapping palimpsest composed of the traces of all the leaking bodies painted atop it. This final stage is inspired by the traces left on my studio wall after painting Melancholia Beyond Mobility, a 5.5m installation painting, which also took the medium of gauche upon linen. The marks this piece left on the wall after painting were so beautiful, it seemed an injustice to wash them away. The vestige sheet is a technology of archiving, whereby these traces can be remembered.

Outcome

The end of this residency would ideally culminate in an open exhibition at The Nunnery Gallery, where the series of work would be displayed to the public. This would also be an opportunity for everyone who participated in the project to get together and solidify queer networks of solidarity. Time allowing, I will also create a zine documenting the process of collecting these stories, thus creating a miniature archive of queer domesticity to be distributed to participants and donated to the Queer Zine Library.

My ideal installation of this show would see the sheets hanging from laundry lines stretched across the gallery interior. The vestige sheet would be hung as centrally as possible. Held up by cloths pegs and swaying slightly as visitors move through them, this install would ideally invoke a further sense of the domestic laundry day, when the stains can never truly be scrubbed out.