Working within traditions of queer craft abstraction, this piece focuses on the queering of textiles in order to allude to their relationality to the body and subvert expectations of craft as a medium. Craft has historically been belittled for its practicality, the lack of metaphor, and the unintellectual nature it holds. Using craft as a way to disidentify the social constructs of queerness employs queerness to disidentify the social constructs of craft; the two work alongside each other to subvert and remove preconceived notions from one another.
The chopping up and reassembling of material within the piece alludes to the trans experience of a crafting handmade self, a chosen family, a life made from the scraps of the person I once was. I want this piece to be both my own personal exploration of identity and a sort of tribute, an altarpiece for my trans elders and the current state of violence against trans individuals. I wanted to celebrate, but also to mourn. Using dichotomies of seamless and disturbed, practical and impractical, I wanted to create a complex piece that sparks conversations in and of itself. The messy, unstable quality of the work itself alludes to many things, one being the precarity of gender identity and sexuality. Both of these exist in such fluid states and I wanted to portray the vulnerability of expression through the unraveling of handmade yarn pieces. The clothing itself holds a history and has its own associations socially, appropriating that same practice of materialism from craft abstraction. The pink silk pillowcase is reminiscent of femininity while also alluding to a more sexual connotation with the term “pillow princess” often being associated with femme lesbians. The multi-colored striped fabric underneath resembles the stripes of a pride flag, but contains disidentified colorings that remove it from any specific identity’s flag.
