Compost

‘Compost’ is an on-going collaboration with photographic artist, Michael Swann. Using collaborative methods of research and photographic experimentation, the artists queer the common practices of visualising sexuality and gender. The work rejects, dismantles and decomposes heteronormative views of nature to present the human and non-human as the entangled entities they are. 

‘Compost’ centres on examples of non-heteronormative reproductive systems, symbiotic relationships in nature and metaphorical representations of the Queer experience. We move through forests of lichen and well-trodden desire lines, from intimate abstractions of metamorphosis to self-pollinating waterlilies. Connections are drawn between the human and the natural through a game of cat’s cradle with a fruit tree and imagery of skin/leaf hybrids. The imagery often veers into the horrific through dark representations of insects and monstrous creatures, representing the perceived threatening presence of the queer individual amongst the heteronormative, nuclear family structure.