Artist Statement:
My practice this year has centred on the aesthetics and politics of visibility—on who is seen, how, and under what terms. I’ve explored how both digital and physical spaces mediate the legibility of marginalised identities.
Moving from investigating #rabiespride and into a year-long investigation into folklore, platform politics, and disinformation, this work is a deliberate act of mimicry and misdirection. Drawing on my own upbringing in a newsagent—a site where “neutral” public communication often masked abusive ideologies—I began to dissect how the visual authority of flyers, health advisories, and religious pamphlets grants them cultural power. By repurposing these forms, I confront how content that appears rational or scientific can encode moral panic, surveillance, or fear. This technique aligns with the aesthetic of “genre mimicry” discussed by Sophie Bishop, who identifies how creators working in feminist and queer spheres often adopt and subvert mainstream forms to resist platform constraints (Bishop).
The project exists as both an archive and counter-archive of fictional material. It includes dozens of conflicting documents: moral panics, clinical advisories, resistance zines, evangelical warnings, all speaking in contradictory voices. Through these, I interrogate how monstrosity is produced by context, and how the same figure—cryptid, strange, other—can be weaponised, pitied, or reclaimed depending on who is doing the narrating. This range is echoed in my decision to author fictional contributors: Professor Alaric Westmere, whose clinical language mirrors institutional marginalisation; Blake Wright, a queer cryptozoologist invested in personal experience and empathy; and Walter Benjamin, a folklorist whose interest lies in ambiguity and belief. These personas reflect how discourse itself can sculpt identity, often without consent.
The theoretical framework behind this work developed alongside my dissertation, How Do Digital Platforms Empower and Commodify Marginalised Artists, and What Systemic Barriers and Algorithmic Biases Affect Their Representation and Visibility? (Dunn). There, I argue that digital spaces often create a paradox for marginalised artists: empowerment through visibility comes at the cost of commodification, surveillance, and algorithmic distortion. Platforms reward legibility—identities and narratives that are easily parsed, branded, and engaged with. But queerness, especially when messy or angry or grief-ridden, resists simplification. I wrote: “To be legible is to be reduced” (Dunn). The Unreality Archive enacts this refusal by leaning into contradiction, obfuscation, and density. No one document explains the work in full; meaning is produced through accumulation, friction, and overload.
This archival fragmentation is also a response to what José Esteban Muñoz names “disidentification”—a process through which minoritarian subjects negotiate oppressive systems by neither fully assimilating nor wholly rejecting them (Muñoz). My use of satire, sincerity, and speculative myth performs this push and pull: I do not reject categorisation outright but expose its instability.
My engagement with monstrosity is inspired by creative works that treat the monstrous with compassion and nuance. Tove Jansson’s Moomin series, in particular, shaped my interest in the tender monster—creatures who are odd or frightening yet deeply human in their emotional complexity (Jansson). Brian Froud’s conceptual work for The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth also informed my design ethos, demonstrating how visual storytelling can reimagine strangeness as sacred (Froud). Paul Reid’s classical paintings of mythological beings such as centaurs and the Minotaur reframe these figures not as brutes but as mournful, embodied presences (Reid). Julian Miholics’s art—fusing American cryptids, queer identity, and paleoart—inspired my integration of folklore and modern marginalisation into a single visual language (Miholics).
The Unreality Archive is, in many ways, a portrait of the internet as both haunt and hope. I draw on Erik Davis’s TechGnosis, where digital culture is described as saturated with mysticism, conspiracy, and narrative re-enchantment (Davis 11). The Archive is not a stable taxonomy but a viral spread: posters appearing in public spaces with QR codes, zines that feel like they were made in a panic or a trance, flyers that contradict each other line by line. These materials borrow from Christian tract design, punk zines, health misinformation leaflets, and paranormal magazines. Like the platforms I critique, they invite belief—but offer no resolution.
The final installation will resist the cleanliness of the gallery. Overflowing with competing voices, inviting viewers to touch, take, and interpret. This presentation echoes my larger concern: that identity is not fixed, and that “representation” is not always a gift. The monster is never just a metaphor—it is also a strategy for survival, a site of projection, a reclamation. My archive does not explain the monster. It asks why we need it—and who gets to decide what it means.
Bibliography:
Bishop, Sophie. “The Affective Labour of Visibility: Algorithmic Constraints and the Relational Dynamics of Social Media Branding.” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 19, no. 4, 2019, pp. 518–531.
Davis, Erik. TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information. Serpent’s Tail, 2004.
Dunn, Rowan. How Do Digital Platforms Empower and Commodify Marginalised Artists, and What Systemic Barriers and Algorithmic Biases Affect Their Representation and Visibility? University of Reading, 2025. Unpublished undergraduate dissertation.
Froud, Brian, and Alan Lee. Faeries. Abrams, 1978.
Jansson, Tove. Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip. Drawn & Quarterly, 2006.
Miholics, Julian. Julian Miholics Art Portfolio. www.julianmiholics.com. Accessed May 5, 2025.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Reid, Paul. Mythological Paintings. www.paulreidart.co.uk. Accessed May 5, 2025.