Mutants — Em Frank

MUTANTS

2023

TACTILE ARTS RESIDENCY
Darwin

A three month collaborative residency with Tarzan JungleQueen, culminating in an exhibtion at Tactile Arts in Darwin.

Mutants is an exploration of bodies as a site of coercive social and political control, and the refusal to perform gender and beauty as an act of resistance.

The collaboration began with the creation of a series of distorted self-portraits, collaged from images of our own bodies. The images were cut up and glued back together to create emancipated versions of self that subvert mainstream beauty standards and defy binary assignment.

From these portraits, a body of work developed combining ceramics, perspex, posca and poetry collage.

Mutants is a celebration of fluidity and noncompliance. It urges us to comprehend gender as imaginary, flexible, and blurred, as a spectrum of boundless possibilities.

Living and labouring on Kaurna Yarta

@em___frank