Glasgow School of Art, 2023.
I will make a mess, I will refuse to be contained and I will hold ground for the ever certain possibility of being misunderstood.
“Queer mess is to do with asserting the value and pleasure of formations of knowledge that sit outside long-standing institutional hierarchies of research . . . an embodied resistance to sanitary boundaries” – Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier on the Practice of Queer Mess as Research
The work RHIP performatively acts to queer the white cube academic landscape through an embodied process of queer messiness. Paint is the vessel and hair, as an extension of the body, is the carrier for these gestures of resistance. The residue, the remains, the energy left behind from RHIP hint to an act that refuses to reveal itself in full luminosity. To RHIP is to break through the boundaries of academic frameworks for success, to mess with the architecture of the space and embrace the inevitability of failure.
RHIP is about fully embracing the process. Creating a space that allows for messiness without bounds and framing the timebased process of creation as the art form, diverting emphasis from the finished form. The piece is not just about a climax of whipping, but also the act of dressing and self-care. The relationship between the aritst and their hair is deeply personal. The work brings to light a personal struggle as a trans person suffering from hair loss and finding ways to care for themself. Through the act of both whipping the hair and ripping through fabric Ocean brings forth a defiant resistance to the pressure put on trans bodies by societal beauty standards and gender biases, actively channeled into the sanitary boudnaries of the white cube insitutionalised space. Each mark, an inprint of the synthetic hair extension, are representations of this tension between beauty and pain.