New exhibition co-curated by Craftspace opens at mac Birmingham.
The transformative power of ‘queerness’ and metal connect in an international exhibition and digital project later this month.
{Queer} + {Metals} is a Craftspace exhibition co-curated by its Director Deirdre Figueiredo and Dauvit Alexander artist and tutor at Birmingham City University’s School of Jewellery in collaboration with artist Rebekah Frank.
The exhibition, which opens on 12th November at Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham, uses the lens of metalworking to explore the multiplicity of queerness – whether as identity, lived experiences, thinking, cultures, aesthetic, influences, stories, place, and imagination – in relation to metalwork and metalsmithing.
8 UK artists are represented physically in the exhibition, whilst international artists who participated in Rebekah Frank’s digital residency are represented through an Instagram campaign and video interviews. Frank devised an online survey to gather perspectives from around the world. Respondents answered questions about what it means to be a queer, how queer-ness and metal-ness overlap and whether it matters. 119 responses were received from every continent except Antarctica!
Dauvit Alexander’s Walk Like a Man (Sex Crime) cod piece was made in response to a mass shooting at a gay club in Orlando. A gun is sliced up into lace-like fragments, studded with pink gems and re-assembled as camp disco-wear thus rendering it useless.
Gilbert Hadden, an alumni of BCU School of Jewellery, presents a set of knives produced at a traumatic time of coming out as transgender. He says, “My mind cannot hold the person I was in those first few months of living as the new me, so instead, he is captured in this collection… Safely harboured in the hard, cold steel of these blades is a young, lost queer soul, and in bearing the weapons he made to protect himself from the world, I think I can finally reach him.”
Fei He, an alumni of BCU School of Jewellery, Annie Higgins and Theo Somerville-Scott all explore gender fluidity. Fei He combines body adornment with drag art and Higgins’ abstract forged steel figurines suggest androgynous human torsos, whilst Somerville-Scott’s colourful flocked and powder-coated sculpture is inspired by Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando’
Roxanne Simone’s welded and hydroformed ‘imperfect’ objects explore and reimagine identities formed through the impact of diaspora and migration.
Deirdre Figueiredo MBE, Director, Craftspace said, “Dauvit, Rebekah and myself identify as LGBTQ+ as part of our intersectional identities, making this project a personal and collective endeavour. We are proud to occupy public space in presenting this work. We want to provide the opportunity for a wider audience to become more aware of diverse cultures and for LGBTQIA+ visitors to feel included.”
There will be a free guided tour of the exhibition at 12pm on Saturday 12th November as part of the SHOUT Festival and a panel discussion on 2nd February 2023 as part of LGBT History Month 2023.