Communion

Communion is a project dedicated to remembering and celebrating the lives of marginalised queer people who were murdered for living as themselves. The project is a rejection of the attempts to dismiss, defile or simply erase LGBTQIA+ people. It started from a need to process on a personal level the emotional impact of news reports of hate crime murders that became increasingly frequent during the Covid pandemic. It has continued in part because of the engagement of those in the community who have reacted positively and encouraged me to continue.

I believe that hate crime and the manner in which authority and society respond to it act to create an environment of fear, as well as the sense that LGBTQIA+ lives are disposable and shameful. In spite of this queer people continue to live openly in defiance of attempts to control or police them into compliance. The works are meant to celebrate the simultaneously incandescent and ordinary lives that have been lost, as well as mourning, they also are a refusal of the tendency to place the inflicted pain, death and violence at the centre of how we remember them.

The project is also about visibility, asking us who is deserving of commemoration and who we are content to erase, sweep under the carpet. Many of these were create using photographs that were blurry or overly cropped, and in some sense the accessibilty of photographs has dictated the choice of portraits.

The project consists of a series of portraits that evoke a sense of the sacred through references to spiritual iconography to create spaces for contemplation and stillness.