Selected Film Works
2K scanned 16mm film. 9:52 mins.
A vampiric trio facilitates the transition of a new host across a former limestone quarry and the sacred mountain grotto of Mary Magdalene, troubling the binaries of life, death, gender and parasitism. Monuments to female saints become poses of living queer memory, as skeletal remains are transformed with embellishments. A mosquito draws blood with its proboscis and hormones are drawn using a syringe, as the remnants of an extracted zone is now overgrown with lifeforms.
Filmed on 16mm, the work unfolds within the disused ENCI marl quarry in Sint Pietersberg, the Netherlands, and the Magdalene cave of Sainte-Baume Mountain in southern France; a site where Mary Magdalene lived in isolation for the last 30 years of her life following her exile. The film takes inspiration from Langston Hughes poem ‘Tired’ whose beckoning words call to “cut the world in two,” reinterpreting this gesture within an age of extinction. Embracing tropes of eco-horror and exploitation cinema, a sensorial score by John Brennan and Elisa Ferrari drives us through the erotic desire paths of the vampiric; where water, blood, hormones and stone remain transformative, viral, abundant and alive.
Made with generous support from the K.M. Hunter Charitable Foundation, Amarte Fund and donors who wish to remain anonymous.
Sunbeam gets surgery and is brought back to life. A doll of Sunbeam, a cute and chaotic personification of the sun invoking the trans Roman Empress Heliogabalus, is split open, remade and implanted with collected ‘resonant’ objects - a rib bone, a lock of hair, teeth, pharmaceutical hormones and a peach pit for a brain. Performed by the artist and filmed in her own bedroom and kitchen, the intimate film explores a domestic imaginary for restitching transfeminine histories, a communion with the dead and the sensual reinvention of a body with no end.
Commissioned by Ehrlich Steinberg, with generous support from Mondriaan Fund and Amarte Fund.
Press:
- Gay Times (Mention)
- The Bittersweet Review (Mention)
descending notes explores transness as a form of dissonance and resonance. It takes inspiration from Donny Hathaway’s heartfelt rendition of A Song for You, whose lyrics are punctuated by a discordant progression of piano notes: “If my words don’t come together, listen to the melody ‘cause my love is in there hiding… I love you in a place where there's no space or time.”
Written and performed with artists Ada M. Patterson and Raffia Li, the film is a cosmic love story between three transing beings whose desire unfolds across time and space, from the sensuality of early Christian sainthoods to future alien intimacies. Grounded in autobiographical experiences of tenderness, solidarity and grief within transgender friendships and everyday life; as the world splits apart, these undercover beings covertly learn to live in transformation and to give each other breath.
Commissioned and produced by Gasworks, with generous support from the Freelands Foundation.
Press:
- Frieze
- Artforum
- Ocula
- Art Monthly
HD video, sound, subtitles. 16:05 mins
A sibling sound work to the film descending notes in Earth is a Deadname and narrated by the voice of Jo Mariner. Part confessional, part ramble, part lament, The Law of Desire is Fascist complicates gender, desire, and religious narratives in a world of pharmoco-dystopian possibility. A narrative exploration of the history of whippets, a celebration of the potentials of hormone replacement therapy, and a glimpse inside a saint’s body from another world.
Commissioned and produced by Gasworks, with generous support from the Freelands Foundation.
Press:
- Frieze
- Artforum
- Ocula
- Art Monthly
A film about holes, how to listen to them and how to tend to them. Taking form as a cosmic poetic-fiction, the film follows the mystical coming-of-age story of a vampiric 8000 year old being, a burning meteorite and the visitation of an alien fungus that translates the unspeakable voices of trees.
Inspired by the medieval English lyric ‘Fowelles in the Frith,’ in which to walk with the forest one “must go mad”, the choral voices of an angelic narrator lead us as they dream of learning to listen to trees and their resultant transformations. Imagining an eco-erotics of a fantastic body of holes; holes-in-time, black holes, mouths, ears and other bodily junctures are threaded into a spiralling cosmology of trans motherhood for birthing other worlds. Featuring performance with Sarjon Azouz and a score with Marie Tučková, the video installation troubles relations of belonging, musicality and Christian mysticism, questioning how can we listen to the unspeakably sensual, inarticulable and untranslatable?
Commissioned by Well Projects, with support from the Arts Council England.