2020-2023 HONOURING SURVIVAL
CW: Artworks during this period feature reference to mental health and transgender lived experience.
As the world suffered the trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic, many found the imposition of geographical lockdown shifted the way we understood and experienced our daily life. Grief and loss was a constant for all but a need for hope emerged.
2020 marked tjb’s 40th birthday and in the year following CHTHONIC, she continued to openly acknowledged the beginning of her journey through transition. Expressions of her own authenticity were foregrounded as she became increasingly comfortable with her gender, sexuality and hidden disabilities. Her artistic practice through this period honoured surviving the trauma that had forcibly repressed and almost destroyed her in her formative years through Section 28. And though suffering would continue to be present in the lives of everyone through the pandemic, this was an important period to centre and ground herself in queer hope.
Her practice during 2020 to 2023 would evolve across painting and sculpture, alongside her ongoing and expanding work as an author and scholar (under the name T J Bacon) exploring queer phenomenology and multimodal forms of writing.
As the world suffered the trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic, many found the imposition of geographical lockdown shifted the way we understood and experienced our daily life. Grief and loss was a constant for all but a need for hope emerged.
2020 marked tjb’s 40th birthday and in the year following CHTHONIC, she continued to openly acknowledged the beginning of her journey through transition. Expressions of her own authenticity were foregrounded as she became increasingly comfortable with her gender, sexuality and hidden disabilities. Her artistic practice through this period honoured surviving the trauma that had forcibly repressed and almost destroyed her in her formative years through Section 28. And though suffering would continue to be present in the lives of everyone through the pandemic, this was an important period to centre and ground herself in queer hope.
Her practice during 2020 to 2023 would evolve across painting and sculpture, alongside her ongoing and expanding work as an author and scholar (under the name T J Bacon) exploring queer phenomenology and multimodal forms of writing.
Love// Rage//
Love// Rage// would manifest over 5 variations. Each capturing tjb’s love of working in oil as a process that challenges the artist with patience and captures an often extended period of time in her process, whereby she may begin an image years before finally settling upon a conclusion. For tjb, oil painting is durational performance, capturing movement and immobility. Love// Rage// is a good example of this, commencing prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, the artist first making marks in 2019 and documenting an evolution of frustration and turmoil from the external world up against the love, care and support in their private life.
Black Cross
The black cross represents survival. Originating for tjb in 2016 and emerging into xis practice post-residency at the Sidney Nolan Trust in 2017. It would not be exhibited in any form until its use in CHTHONIC in 2019. Where, at the end of 17 hour durational action, the ash and bone remains of 500 knuckles were bound and sealed into the black cross motif and left as installation.The images of the before and the after were created over an extended period of thought and reflection on tjb’s in/visible dis/abled lived experience.
Hung Body (’20)
Reclaiming a period of difficult mental health, tjb returned to an earlier image from thier practice from over a decade prior to create a celebration of survival in this large scale painting on canvas.