Always already emerging - 2021
The opportunity to work with vellum in the form of a wallaby skin came to me at a significant time in my life. I rarely make work that is explicitly personal, nor do I usually work with vellum, so this project has been challenging both materially and personally.
Major themes in this work include transformation, affirmation, intersectional identity, relationality, displacement, queering.
I wanted to make a work that honoured the skin of the animal but that was not bound by its shape. I decided to queer the borders of the skin in order to allow it to become something new, multiple selves that would continue to change in relation to other parts, turning and twisting in response to the environment. This is something that queer people do every day in every interaction we have with others and with our environs. We decide how we will appear to others, whether it is safe to be visible and how we will present our selves in any given moment or exchange. We can rarely just ‘be’.
This is a work that is both delicate and tough, beautiful and visceral, it is intensely ‘of’ the body. The gestural mark making expressed in printer’s ink is bold and declarative. Printer’s ink would usually be forced into the lines in a plate but here it is allowed to play freely. The gold stitching speaks to the beauty of the act of making oneself, of crafting a body that affirms who I am as a person. Each of the objects suspended in the work is able to move independently of the other parts and this movement means the work will never be static; it will be forever in process interacting with its environment, always already emerging.
Rachel Joy
Dr. Rachel Joy is a Melbourne-based visual artist and independent academic. Their paintings, print works, sculptural practice and writings comment on local and global issues regarding place, identity and history.
Trained as an historian before turning to art, Rachel's artworks often reference hidden historical events and offer new ways of understanding them. Rachel has won public art commissions and international residencies and has collaborated with companies of significant renown including Opera Victoria and Snuff Puppets Theatre Company. Most recently their print works have been shown in New York, San Francisco, and Sophia in Bulgaria.
They are published in books and academic journals and their work has been exhibited at a range of galleries and public spaces internationally and throughout Australia.