Rat Bedlington

About the work

The installation Proteus is inhabited by structures, whose growth is somewhere between organic and artificial. They could resemble colossal ruinous monuments in an unfamiliar landscape, or strange growths sprouting from the ground. They drip and ooze, and sprout fur, wires, and jewels. They could be living things, transformed or evolved beyond recognition. On close inspection, they sport small panels, showing figures in static states. They are screens, and these growths are consoles, through which to access the world above. The user manual is encoded within you, tucked in a wrinkle on the surface of your brain.

Above them are floating archways, sitting above like moments of clarity in a jumble of celestial noise. They are windows to powerful constellations, with figures beyond scale wrapping themselves around galactic structures and monstrous black holes. It is unclear whether they are regarding the world below with judgement, ambivalence, or guidance. The growths and the constellations are part of the same technology. Natural and wholly unnatural at the same time, an inevitability of the nature of the universe, but wrought from nature by forces independent of it, by us.

The appearance of the structures is gleaming, coated in precious bejeweled velvet, adorned with intimate paintings. They are hybridized constructions, composed of recycled cardboard from dozens of moving boxes. The material felt irresistible, now imbued with mundane significance from my own upheavals. I engaged in a process of stomping, crushing and tearing apart the boxes, before tenderly and fastidiously joining them back together into new forms, where parts are still clearly in their original configuration and others architecturally changed. Their materiality is masked by their new, enriched surface. The reconstruction was like an intimate surgery, and elevating the material to something treasured felt like a powerful and poignant transmutation. I put myself into the process, and became a little envious of the transformational power they embodied.

Above them float several constellations. I, in a series of intimate moments, am superimposed over the celestial compositions, and pose in order to reveal the hidden forms within them. The power of the celestial body to guide terrestrial beings is here in my painted body. My guidance is given to previous states of Rat, impossibly projecting backwards. There exist three states here, but the states of the future are innumerable, because the change will never be completed. Parts of them appear on other panels, and tessellate. Their connections are inspired by divine interventions, like St Francis Receiving the Stigmata, or The Lactation of St Bernard. I tacitly reenact the melodrama, appropriating it for my own cosmic joke.

The panels are swarming with celestial events. Black holes circle each other in a dance stretching across the vastness of the universe. Stars are born and die, both events joined at opposite ends of the circle of time. Rather than a singular view of the night sky, as seen from Earth, the sky is revealed in its full complexity, without the veil of our worldly perception. These constellations stretch across this endlessness too, guides who change themselves as the vantage point changes.

I allow these beings to guide me, past and future selves, and resist the fear of their alarming transformation. Looking back, my own self would have found the current overwhelming. There is universality to this experience, but the queer self possesses potent powers of transmutation.

Transformative, destructive, and generative forces cohabit space with my constellated form. The advanced technology of the inner self powers the growth of the forms in the space below. Together they link in a looping path, where looking forward and backwards are sometimes indistinguishable.