Collaboration with Mackenzie Lee
This collection looks to interrogate the human need to label and categorise the world around us into black and white spaces. The works looking to question what happens when objects, culture, identity and sexuality have multiple overlapping labels causing confusion of grey areas where we as individuals struggle to make sense of self in a dominant binary system. The use of body adornment objects represents self-determined acts of expression of individual identity.
The use of the blank label represents the wearer providing the missing information, asserting their own system of self-identification - importantly this process means that the label can evolve fluidly as the wearer determines.
Labels and pages of so-called 'Aboriginal Word Dictionaries' are used as material to create the adornment pieces - signalling the importance of agency to determine the language used to label us - as well as our cultural, sexual and gender identity and the way we choose to express them.
This use of labels as material also speaks to the power of the individual/minority to challenge and assert their dominance in spaces where the labels have historically be predetermined by the dominant power.
Self: Adorned #1
Pages of ‘Aboriginal words and Place names’, Chinese knotting cord, bookbinding thread, entomology display case, entomology display pins, label.
210 x 293mm
Pages of ‘Aboriginal words and Place names’, Chinese knotting cord, bookbinding thread, entomology display case, entomology display pins, label.
210 x 293mm
Self: Adorned #2 and 3
Pages of ‘Aboriginal words and Place names’, Chinese knotting cord, bookbinding thread, entomology display case, entomology display pins, label.
210 x 293mm
Self: Adorned #4
Pages of ‘Aboriginal words and Place names’, Chinese knotting cord, bookbinding thread, entomology display case, entomology display pins, label.
210 x 293mm
Image Credit: Victorian Pride Centre
Blood Type: Ink by Mackenzie Lee
Handmade paper using pages of ‘Aboriginal words and Place names’, inkjet print
420 x 594mm
Handmade paper using pages of ‘Aboriginal words and Place names’, inkjet print
420 x 594mm
Statement:
Blood Type: Ink is my take on the ‘we all bleed the same’ metaphor. Everybody goes through the struggles of the first two poems to some extent, but in the end, we are more alike than we think. This poem is not disjointed, as it represents acceptance and self-love.
Epidermis Verso by Mackenzie Lee
Handmade paper using pages of ‘Aboriginal words and Place names’, inkjet print
420 x 594mm
Handmade paper using pages of ‘Aboriginal words and Place names’, inkjet print
420 x 594mm
Statement:
Epidermis Verso represents the work put into figuring out your own identity and how you wish to present to the world; others don’t necessarily see the struggles and experimentations that it takes to be comfortable in how you present. This poem is still slightly disjointed, but not as much as the first.
Title: Epidermis - Outer layer of skin, Verso - a left-hand page of an open book, or the back of a loose document//the reverse of something such as a coin or painting
Title: Epidermis - Outer layer of skin, Verso - a left-hand page of an open book, or the back of a loose document//the reverse of something such as a coin or painting
Adornment, Obscurement by Mackenzie Lee
Handmade paper using pages of ‘Aboriginal words and Place names’, inkjet print
420 x 594mm
Handmade paper using pages of ‘Aboriginal words and Place names’, inkjet print
420 x 594mm
Statement:
Adornment, Obscurement is about feeling the need to hide your identity in order to be safe, as well as the pain/discomfort that comes with it. Purposely formatted to be disjointed, as it is representing the disconnect between inner identity and what we show to the world.
