Compost

In collaboration with photographic artist, Michael Swann, Compost queers the ways in which sexuality and gender are typically visualised through collaboration and experimentation, inspired by Queer Ecology and symbiotic relationships in nature. The work rejects, dismantles, and decomposes heteronormative views of nature, presenting the human and non-human as the entangled entities they are.

Viewing ecology through the lens of Queer Theory helps us to see beyond the closed system we have created, in which humanity impacts a natural world it is detached from. Our traditional ways of categorising flora, fauna, and fungi in order to name and understand them are binary and restrictive.

Compost centres on examples of non-heteronormative reproductive systems, symbiotic relationships in nature, and metaphorical representations of the queer experience. In this work, connections are drawn between the human and the natural through a mixture of intimate abstractions, visceral close-ups, and exchanges played out in front of the camera. The imagery often veers into the horrific, representing the perceived threatening presence of the queer individual within the heteronormative nuclear family structure.