moon babies squidding in The Land of Nod
2019

created in collaboration with Hang Linton, my primary carer and life partner, this audiovisual installation replicates our explorations of unconventional care methods that we have created and developed within our relationship. This work was commissioned and created for the Adam Reynolds Award for Disabled Artists with Shape Arts, exhibited at BALTIC39 Newcastle.

We invite you to swim through a slice of the dystopian world of Baby Punk + Dr. Babuyoka. A world of autonomous and interdependent health/care, created out of the necessity to survive without access to the healthcare that we need. Although our world has been created due to lack, loss and trauma, it is a landscape of nourishment and transformation that conventional Western medicine has never and could never provide. Like mushrooms growing in dirt and shit. Like the trash we live in and that we need to live, we reuse and recycle to survive on a planet that is dying.

The installation contains three video works:
Objects of Desire: never too sick to fuck
A miniature landscape of pleasure and pain created together in a time and space. A demonstration of the many forms that sex, sensuality and intimacy can take. In this case it takes the form of a spontaneously improvised New Moon ritual with objects from our domestic space that were important to us at the time, accompanied by a live improvised soundscape. We created a small intimate space for one or maybe two people to experience this film at a time. This space was created for creatures who don’t enjoy being in busy places like gallery openings.

The Passing of Light in the Name of Mothlad
From the mighty moth to the mere human, we all pass through cycles. Sleep, wake, eat, breathe, life, death, work, rest, rave, dance. A moths natural instinct is to follow the moon but we flood its senses with artificial sources. What is our true light and what is artificial? We honor this night-creature as a force of nature, a spiritual symbol and a contemporary internet meme deity.

Creepy Creature Care follows the initial journey of our alter-egos, Baby Punk + Dr. Babuyoka, and the beginning of our collaborative practice. The performance explores our multifaceted queer crip and care giving identities. The work challenges common preconceptions of what it is to be sick, crip or disabled. Our bodies are POLITICAL, SPIRITUAL, JOYFUL, SEXY and ANGRY. We share the intimacy of our autonomous modes of care within our relationship, which challenges the patriarchal modes of medical institutions.

Page Description: A white background with black text. The top of the page has an image on the left. There are 7 images below the text.
Image Descriptions: 1: An image of a painting on a blue bedsheet which has been pinned to a gallery wall. The painting is an abstract painting of a body falling or lying down surrounded by long brushstrokes in lots of colours, dots of paint and white brushstrokes that look like symbols. 2: Small plastic plants on the top of a speaker. 3: A tent made of colourful plastic shopping bags, filled with faux fur blankets and cushions in red, pink and purple. It is lit with a disco light and a small screen inside playing a video. Next to it is a blue foil helium balloon that says 'Stay Sick' on it and a gold shiny table with various sound and video equipment on and a shrine on top with bottles, candles and other various medical and ritual items. 4: A view of most of the installation including a moth made from recycled materials, suspended from the ceiling, a large wonky colourful video projection on the back wall, a lit up shrine like object, a backdrop of faux fur in pink and green and a curtain of latex gloves lit in orange and green, cardboard hospital bedpans and a silver foil balloon. 5: A circle of cardboard hospital bedpans, black stones are scattered in and around them. In the centre is a pink bowl containing a small mirror, latex gloves and large tealights. 6: A close up of the shrine object, a small suspended box painted in red with pink splatters containing bones, a small pig nurse figurine, medical equipment, chandelier crystals, fake flowers, behind is the lower part of the shrine which is covered in green stones and other medical and ritual objects like catheters and candles. 7: A perspective of the same shrine further away so that it is visible in it's entirity. It is a 3 leveled table, under it is a tangle of black electrical wires and black stones, on the lower level are bottles and candles and fairy lights, the suspended box is abov and another levels with more small objects like latex gloves and medicine bottles, the top layer has candles, plants and other small objects and stones. The whole shrine is adorned in dripping chandelier crystals. 8: A close up of the curtain covered in white latex gloves backlit in orange and green.