Texture Shots
Interior: Off Straight Street
Exploring the relationship between the everydayness of queer experience and it’s proximity to de-industrialised spaces, the work was conceived as an investigation of queer spaces in the vicinity of the exhibition site. Nearby Old Market is cited as the ‘gay village’ of Bristol, something which happened in the late nineties/early two thousands. This echoes a history of queer communities being established in deindustrialised areas of other cities. This piece is the starting point of a longer investigation into this heritage and how it operates with the often developer-driven, regeneration of city spaces; as well as a continuing decline in the amount of queer spaces in recent years.
Originally conceived late in 2019, the project was slowed by the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting lockdown. This has changed the work in a number of ways and has meant that the work reflects ideas of the slow isolation and inevitable effect on queer experience which has taken place in this time. Texture Shots is a wider iterative project which the artist has been undertaking over a similar period of time, which utilises slow paced imagery to create a space for the exposure of queer narratives within lived environments.
This work was produced for Centre of Gravity which took place at Soapworks, Bristol throughout October 2020.