Organised Chaos

Make up designs for Tahanie My look for my performance is something that makes my piece. Due to my theme being surrounded by LGBTQ Rights, I wanted to represent both the pride and the pain of what it feels like to be LBGTQ sometimes. Drag is of course a huge part of gay culture, but is often coined to that perspective. Performance drag can be an art form of mastered correctly: as TV personality, RuPaul has shown us. Drag is more of a whole LGBT celebration, rather than being just a stereotypical aspect of the 'gay scene'. If you identify as something different (or other to the norm), then you're bound to feel consumed by the constructs of the social world. I am wearing a baggy orange dust suit as it covers my body, but also represents a jail costume. Often I feel jailed in by other people's perspectives and expectations of what it means to live as 'female'. Just because I'm trans and I present as non-binary, doesn't mean that I don't get hurt when people refer to me as 'Madam' or 'Miss'.

To complete my visual piece, I wanted to make shadows/silhouettes of people protesting behind me as I perform on stage. (Much like it would have been back in the day at LGBT marches with 'protest songs') Similar to Bob and Roberta Smith, I created 6 cm long mini placards for the silhouettes to hold. Each little placard has something political written on it - for example things like "Not a phase" "Queer is beautiful, too" "Don't let us fall to the Trumpocalypse" I believe this will help to create the political side of my performance, and will also help to contextualise my work further.