Spawning ecodeviance : an exegesis presented with exhibition as fulfillment of the requirements for thesis: Master of Fine Arts at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand

Abstract

In this exegesis, which is presented with an exhibition as a thesis, three broad and intersecting frameworks of queer ecologies, queer technologies, and queer archives are spoken of in relation to my visual arts practise. Queerness in relationship to Nature cannot be untangled from culture, politics and power. “Nature” has often been weaponised to enforce normative codes. My ongoing work envisions a mutation of normative ways of being. My visual practise uses poetics as a mode of rejecting normatively with an eye towards the potential of disgust and desire to open new pleasures. Using video as a site of experimentation, I have been creating videos that seek transmissions through holes and gaps. Including queer theory with respect to reproductions and the futurity, the works seek pleasure for impure and unnatural bodies. This exegesis grapples with two parallel contradictions: that queerness is the most natural thing, and that all bodies are no longer natural. In this is a hopefulness, a composting, an opening up of new or queer ways of seeing and being, with pleasure. The works in this thesis attempt to produce a vision of nature as already corrupted and pushed to the threshold of naturalness.