Exhibition text for soft tongues, gritted teeth
When it comes to soft tongues, gritted teeth, a U-HAUL relationship springs to mind. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, it stereotypically describes lesbians that fall in love and move in together outrageously quickly after the first date. With two-weeks to pull this exhibition together, there was a palpable sense of being swept into a rapid, whirlwind romance. The generative forces of a tight-knit community of queers and allies was felt; a community I am forever indebted to.
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Featuring artists from across Australia, soft tongues, gritted teeth presents artworks as a chorus of queer voices, reverberating to blur the bounds between the individual and collective experience. Drawing from the line “strong to my enemies, tender to those I loved and respected” from Leslie Feinberg’s preeminent queer text Stone Butch Blues (1993), the exhibition acknowledges the intersectional core of the queer experience where intimacy, tenderness, ferocity and resilience mingle together. Navigating personal narratives and queer ecologies, the artists pose counter-heteronormative ways of being, connecting and communicating; collapsing harsh edges as a refusal of linearity. Reckoning with queer (in)visibility, questions are posed surrounding what is held within our bodies, what of this we choose to share, and how this is externalised. Through various artistic outputs, the artists playfully and tenderly explore the body, gender, desire, power and kinship to offer affective encounters with queer intimacy and resistance.
Queerness in its porous, polymorphic and fluid nature is itself an act of resistance. It is distinctively non-distinct. Constantly changing, it plays hosts to an active negotiation between this and that, either or neither. Embodying queerness as not only a subject but a methodology, many of the artists offer the proposition: how can we reside in the blurry in-between spaces?
Artist Lucy Whitelaw has inscribed on glass personal musings on the fluidity of queer embodiment and the subtleties of desire. The work changes depending on your positionality, where there are moments of reveal and conceal. Floating amongst these watery thoughts, her work intimately considers the slippages that occur when attempting to articulate something that is innately liquid in nature.
Similarly, Jack Ball plays with their own visual vocabularies to elude and resist fixed assumptions of bodily representation through photography and collage. Ambiguity is a tactic used by Ball to navigate trans representation and the liquidity of gender, melding the boundaries between abstraction and figuration. Capturing their body in playful performances and through using camp aesthetics, they examine self-assemblage and forms of queer embodiment.
Explorations of the body, gender and language are further seen in Holly Bate’s video work, which sees the artist perform in drag as Freddie Mercury to Queen’s ‘Body Language’. Drawing on her personal history and queer identity, Bates conveys the complexities of being a feminine lesbian yet identifying with masculine popular figures. Since the 1950s, many of these pop stars were seen as ‘Dykons’, majorly influencing butch dress, sensibilities, and self-image. Through playfulness, the work aims to confuse, arouse and subvert in its heightened saturation of hyper-masculinity, comedic erotic gestures, and appropriation of sexual power. Drag is an inherent part of queer culture and forms part of the non-verbal communication that is expressed through the body.
Further exploring the use of guises, Chelsea Farquhar creates intricate sculptures using traditional techniques including blacksmithing, lead lighting and costuming to contort or abstract the body and the bodies of her friends, who often serve as models. Here, performativity is used to reckon with power of representation, sexuality and the nature of violence and power. Referencing kink aesthetics and fetishisation, Farquhar provocatively alludes to gimp masks, concealing the wearer’s characteristic features. The mask’s anonymity becomes a catalyst to project notions of queer visibility, fugitivity, desire and intimacy.
Artist Claudia Nicholson reconfigures archived home videos to examine the role of memory in constructing diasporic identities and for collective remembrance. Void of a linear narrative, the assemblage of videos (made mainly for partners over the years) bleed into one another as a recount of Nicholson’s own personal lived experiences as a queer Colombian-born artist now residing in Australia. Evoking a sense of yearning and nostalgia, the artist shares their connection to place and fleeting moments spent with kin and community.
Hannah Brontë’s technicolour works incite a spirit of collectively and healing. A medium that sits between protest and promotion, these posters aim to empower the queer community and incite the sensation of collectively, kinship and ‘chosen’ family. Offering affirmations and reminders, Brontë actively seeks to make queer individuals feel seen and validated, collapsing the singular to offer a community founded on support, connection and resilience.
Blending autobiography and performativity, the artists in soft tongues, gritted teeth invite the viewer to encounter new modes of queer selfhood (self-making, self-belonging, self-positioning), intimacy, collectively and resistance. Queerness fundamentally resists being fully captured, although through these works it is made momentarily visible; presenting what exists within, beyond and between.