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Haraway explores the history of the relationship between humans and machines, and she argues that three boundaries were broken throughout human history which have changed the definition of what is deemed cultural or otherwise natural.

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Her work spans the visceral to technological, present to future, the political and  personal across performance , installation, sculpture, drawing and painting.

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Since the start of specialism, I have been exploring themes of ecology and queerness. An example of piece of work which combined the two is my outcome for the ‘Shelf’ brief. I built upon a piece of existing work by extending a small loom with woven plants to reach the wall by creating a new loom out of mainly real flowers, leaves and branches. The original work was an installation of hangers and wooden frames suspended from the ceiling of the studio. Within the frames, I hung pressed flowers which I worked into using a variety of techniques including heat pressing, knitting, quilting and freestyle stitching. The original piece was meant to be an abstract representation of clothing created to remove the importance of the body and ‘body shapes’ from the way garments are perceived. The shelf was physically disruptive and spilled out of the frame of the original loom, the flowers and leaves also began to fall onto the floor and spread all over the studio. I particularly liked the unpredictability that came from using a natural material in my work.

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Because a honeycomb is naturally made up of hexagonal prisms, it was considered by philosophers to be the manifestation of divine harmony in nature. Its construction was associated with insight and wisdom.

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hyperbolic geometry rejects the Euclidean idea that parallel lines are consistently equidistant.

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Uniform honeycomb in hyperbolic space is a uniform tessellation of uniform polyhedral cells (the building blocks of three-dimensional structures).

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Currently, I have multiple areas of interest in relation to my practice which I want to connect to each other by finding a more niche aspect of each one. The general, overarching themes I am exploring are nature and queerness.

More specifically within the sphere of queerness, I have begun experimenting with the idea that hair and makeup are tools of self-expression and markers of both individual and collective identity. Often, my lack of hair means people assume I don’t appreciate the value of it in relation to identity however, I feel my ‘absence of hair’ is intrinsically linked to my gender expression and identity. Additionally, I see my head as a canvas and often sport different dyed styles. I wanted to level up this idea of my head being a canvas and did a performance piece titled: ‘2mins 58secs’ where I allowed people to spend two minutes and fifty-eight seconds doing whatever they wanted to me using the tools I provided: a pair of hair clippers, hair dye and makeup remover. This was an exercise which required me putting my own comfortability to the test both in terms of handing over control to an unpredictable audience as well as dressing in a way which I usually would not. I have found, within an art/ studio setting I am more willing to push my limits of comfortable self-expression than within a day-to-day context- I want to fully exploit this throughout my FMP and push my boundaries further than I have done up until this point. Another way in which I want to try and expand beyond my typical boundaries is by exploring gender identity in more depth. Many of my artist references to date are people who expand or reject the gender binary within their work and life generally but I also need to do more reading of gender theory from both psychological and sociological perspectives to develop my knowledge beyond a purely individual and anecdotal standpoint.

Along with being a nice metaphor for how I want to entangle multiple connected ideas in my fmp, spiderwebs are another area of interest due to their instrumental role in communication amongst spiders. The process of weaving is one which I use often so the ways in which spiders construct their highly complex and delicate webs is also a point of reference that I want to explore further. I have begun experimenting with hair materially and want to develop this by dying and altering the hair before manipulating it as a fibre. I want to start treating the hair I am using for my work in the same way I treat the hair on my head.

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Sin Wai Kin: 'A Dream of Wholeness in Parts' (2021)

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Sin Wai Kin: 'A Dream of Wholeness in Parts' (2021)

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“Within capitalism, extreme representations are always going to be more successful because they’re unattainable, and more polarised representations of things like gender become normalised. Drag is a purposeful doing of that, which also undoes it.” It’s an argument implicit in the iconic trans performer and Monroe-obsessive Amanda Lepore’s claim that she has ‘the most expensive body on Earth’. “How Lepore literally blows [gender] up is very attractive to me,” says Sin. “Like, ‘You want me to do this? Here it is.’”
Their work presents heavily constructed fantasy narratives on the often unsettling experience of the physical within the social body.

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Is concealing or exaggerating identifying features more impactful?

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Is concealing or exaggerating identifying features more impactful?

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Soundsuits, sculptural forms based on the scale of his body, initially created in direct response to the police beating of Rodney King in 1991. Soundsuits camouflage the body, masking and creating a second skin that conceals race, gender and class, forcing the viewer to look without judgment.

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material test: semi-spherical hair sculpture 

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I am starting to try to create abstract representations of spider webs particularly from hair which is a material I am particularly interested in at the moment.

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Lino print I designed based on developing a drawing I did using shapes I saw in tangled hair as a basis. 

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I believe this piece facilitated a time and space for escapism both for me and the participating audience. It allowed the audience to have a chance to break unspoken social rules concerning invading peoples personal space and giving them agency in deciding how I look. It allowed me to completely switch off and become totally submissive to the audience who were now in total control of my head.

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Deep sea whale falls are thought to be hotspots of adaptive radiation for specialized fauna.[1] Organisms that have been observed at deep-sea whale fall sites include octopus, giant isopods, squat lobsters, polychaetes, prawns, shrimp, lobsters, hagfish, Osedax, crabs, sea cucumbers, and sleeper sharks. New species have been discovered, including some potentially specializing in whale falls.[1] It has been postulated that whale falls generate biodiversity by providing evolutionary stepping stones for multiple lineages to move and adapt to new environmentally-challenging habitats.

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Used for deep sea robotic exploration- found whale falls, it is vessel for discovery and exploration.

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A whale fall occurs when the carcass of a whale has fallen onto the ocean floor at a depth greater than 1,000 m (3,300 ft), in the bathyal or abyssal zones.[1] On the sea floor, these carcasses can create complex localized ecosystems that supply sustenance to deep-sea organisms for decades.

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Drag helped make me aware of the complexity of gender and the absurdity and violence of a society that tells you that you are one of two genders when you are born, and you are treated accordingly for the rest of your life.

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“Was I Zhuang Zhou dreaming I was a butterfly or am I now a butterfly dreaming I am Zhuang Zhou?”

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The Taoist philosopher questions if he is a man dreaming he’s a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he’s a man. “I identified with it in that my reality seems like a made up fantasy for some people,”- SWK. “We are living in a world where many different realities coexist.”
Taosim teaches that all living creatures ought to live in a state of harmony with the universe, and the energy found in it. A cultural, intellectual, religious, and textual tradition ranging from 500 BCE to today. The important Taoist principles are inaction, simplicity and living in harmony with
nature.

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JRL, artist and founder of the Infinity Burial Project, has been working to find a hybrid mushroom that can decompose bodies and metabolize toxins, turning corpses into nutrient-rich soil. Using her own hair, nails and skin cells as food for her mushrooms, she developed the best mushroom variety for the job: the Infinity Mushroom. The suit is covered in a netting laden with mushroom spores and other elements that help decompose, remediate toxins and deliver nutrients to plant roots.

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Dying can be hard on the environment. If you're buried, you're going to be pumped full of a few gallons of toxic embalming fluid, which will soon leach out of your corpse and then out of your casket, which will most likely be stored for posterity in a cemetery that uses tons of pesticides and astronomical amounts of water to keep it looking nice. If you're cremated, your body will be incinerated in an oven for between three and four hours at temperatures of around 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (982 degrees Celsius). It takes about 28 gallons of fuel to incinerate a single human body, and the process releases carbon monoxide, soot and even mercury from dental fillings into the air.

Surely a person's dying wish not to leave one last giant boot print on this planet can be achieved.

The green burial industry is booming these days, and there are certainly a lot of people who claim to have a process or product to help dying people pass out of this world with as little environmental impact as possible. But the Coeio Infinity Burial Suit might be one of the most remarkable.

This suit is not only chic, it is made out of organic cotton and seeded with mushroom spores. Not only that, the company claims the mushrooms can decompose our post mortem bodies while cleaning toxins from our bodies before they leach out into the soil.

Although green burials that don't involve embalming fluids like formaldehyde are a step in the right direction toward making the process of dying a little greener, the Infinity Burial Suit promises to use fungi to clean the toxins we walk around with every day.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, the bodies of 21st century people are full of all kinds of toxins - BPA, heavy metals, volatile organic compounds, preservatives, pesticides, the byproducts of disinfectants and so much more. Mushrooms put out enzymes that break down organic material and remediate toxins in the soil - they've even been touted as the answer to cleaning up everything from nuclear meltdowns to oil spills. And the varieties of fungi that can do this aren't fancy or rare - lots of edible varieties like shiitakes and oyster mushrooms are great at cleaning soil.

Jae Rhim Lee, artist and founder of the Infinity Burial Project, has been working to find a hybrid mushroom that can decompose bodies and metabolize toxins, turning corpses into nutrient-rich soil. Using her own hair, nails and skin cells as food for her mushrooms, she developed the best mushroom variety for the job: the Infinity Mushroom. Now you can buy a suit Lee likens to "ninja pajamas" covered in a netting laden with mushroom spores and other elements that help decompose, remediate toxins and deliver nutrients to plant roots.

"For me, cultivating the Infinity Mushroom is more than just scientific experimentation or gardening or raising a pet," Lee said in her 2011 TED talk about the Infinity Burial Project. "It's a step toward accepting the fact that someday I will die and decay. It's also a step toward taking responsibility for my own burden on the planet."
This story is a part of Covering Climate Now's week of coverage focused on Climate Solutions, to mark the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. Covering Climate Now is a global journalism collaboration committed to strengthening coverage of the climate story.

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Mushroom Burial Suit Creates Life After Death

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Dying can be hard on the environment. If you're buried, you're going to be pumped full of a few gallons of toxic embalming fluid, which will soon leach out of your corpse and then out of your casket, which will most likely be stored for posterity in a cemetery that uses tons of pesticides and astronomical amounts of water to keep it looking nice.

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It's made from organic cotton and seeded with mushroom spores which decompose our post mortem bodies while cleaning toxins from us before they leech into soil. 

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Today’s Top Stories takes the form of a surreal news broadcast. Instead of reading factual news, the Storyteller reports on philosophical propositions on existence, consciousness, naming and identity. The Storyteller is a character played by Sin, recurring in their work. The video becomes distorted as it goes on, with glitches and voice edits increasing in frequency. This further builds on the idea that reality can often be indistinguishable from illusion, not unlike the rumors and propagandic news accounts we encounter daily.

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reminded me of a still from Sin Wai Kin's Today’s Top Stories

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Saraceno uses “interspecies collaborations” to shift perspectives. Does nature need to be abstracted or re-contextualised for people to see the beauty in it and to appreciate the urgency and value of protecting it?

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A 95-foot pressurized sphere. Visitors lay on a net floating 40-feet above ground, to experience vibrations derived from air particle movement.

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"Free the Air: How to hear the universe in a spider/web"

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"Free the Air: How to hear the universe in a spider/web"

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Similar to how spiders relay information through vibratory mechanisms.

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"Free the Air- How to hear the universe in a spider:web"

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Saraceno believes we have pushed our planet past the Anthropocene and into the Capitalocene, a time in which humans are “caught in the undertow of extractivist ethics and the rhythms of capitalism [and] have toxified the air, rendering it unbreathable for many and forcing new regimes of inequality upon us all”.

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A constellation of three-dimensional sculptures interwoven by unrelated spider species. In these hybrid webs, different sensory worlds 

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Zadie Xa uses live performance, video, painting and textiles to question how cultures inform identities and notions of self. Her layered costume works are sites for exploring personal cultural histories that stitch together personally relevant imagery sourced from music, digital space, fashion and art history. Xa has developed a system of personalised symbols that propose entirely new images and objects, creating a personal visual language for articulating nuanced Asian identity narratives, which are frequently situated within fantastical or supernatural realms.

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Xa uses water and marine ecologies as metaphors for exploring the unknown. Creating fantastical underwater realms, using a large-scale, surround-sound video pro

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ZADIE XA: CHILD OF MAGOHALMI AND THE ECHOES OF CREATION

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ZADIE XA: CHILD OF MAGOHALMI AND THE ECHOES OF CREATION

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Lecture that I attended in November which inspired the making of a quilt exploring themes discussed during this talk.

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Seed Talks: An Exploration of Psychedelics and Nature Connectedness

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Seed Talks: An Exploration of Psychedelics and Nature Connectedness

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A section of the quilt made in response to the lecture

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Costumes and masks made in collaboration with Benito Mayor Vallejo, and originally used during performances at Art Night 2019 and the 58th Venice Biennale.

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ZADIE XA: CHILD OF MAGOHALMI AND THE ECHOES OF CREATION

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ZADIE XA: CHILD OF MAGOHALMI AND THE ECHOES OF CREATION

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queerness is a naturally occurring thing despite being told that it is not constantly

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An exhibition which I attended in December that explored different subcultures and their impact in society over the last few decades. 

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A Twisted Tale of Modern Britain (exhibition)

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A Twisted Tale of Modern Britain (exhibition)

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poetic recounting of experiences of communal living in the 80's/ 90's in a queer community

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Makeup wipe transfer to immortalise something which is usually temporary and time-based.

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Sin Wai Kin, Maybe once you were a planet, 2019

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Sin Wai Kin, Maybe once you were a planet, 2019

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My feminine characters are always over the top, but my relationship to masculinity is a little different. Suddenly, it was not about taking something off, but rather trying something on. From a cultural perspective, so often masculinity is equated with an absence of performance, and thus seen as a site of authenticity and authority. TOTAL FABRICATION makes fun of that.

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Masculinity- Emilio Nunzi: 'The Frothing Hedges'

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Masculinity- Emilio Nunzi: 'The Frothing Hedges'

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Extracts from Emilio's 'shelf' where he poetically explored masculinity which I have stitched using free-motion machine embroidery.

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written in response to Emilio's 'shelf' which explored his thoughts and experiences of masculinity

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Masculinity: Writing about my relationship to it  

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Masculinity: Writing about my relationship to it  

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‘The more personal, the more universal’- Octavia E. Butler