Meet the t'ARTists

We spoke to a selection of the artists - multidisciplinary artist Amy Rose-Edlyn, ceramicist Gessica Carbone, fine artist Orlando Szablewicz and artist duo WANKY KWEAN (Ewan Hindes and Ky Pegram) - exhibiting at t'ART Exhibition: Queer Time about their relationships to queerness, their creative practises and what time means to them.

*

What does queer time mean to you?

Amy: To me, queer time can mean no time - it becomes an ethereal matter. Being held in the moment, caught up in the rapture and bathing in the ecstasy of community hum. Queer time is also valuable and heavy as we can spend our time deconstructing constructs and bending stubborn binaries.

Gessica: Queer time to me means being free to be who we are not only for a night, an event or an exhibition but every day of our life without regrets or fears.

Orlando: I  see queer time, especially in regards to trans lives as non linear, meandering, reversing and skipping forward.  Same, our love and emotional life doesn’t align with the traditional order or timeline. 

Ewan and Ky: To us queer time is a separate temporality to the every day- moments when we can travel beyond the "real" and enter realms of mysticism and fantasy. queer time is non-linear, a bubbling pot of future, past and present from which we can drink and revel.

by Gessica Carbone

Tell us about the kind of work you make, and why you make it.

Amy: I am a huge advocate for multidisciplinary practice. I like to create from multiple boxes depending on the feel of the project. Some elements I use include photography, painting, performance, digital art, textiles and sculpture. My work can be very juxtaposing - joyful but macabre. Originating as a theatre designer, I respond to stories and people. When I make something, such as the photograph series in the exhibition, I intend to uplift and empower the personalities of collaborators and share the energy they exude.

Gessica: The urge is to shape feelings, emotions and impressions perceived, lived, or suffered. Clay is used as an organic and natural 3D representation of these concrete “emotional states” of the human being.

Each creature contains a story within itself: a mysterious glance, a sudden happiness, a deep look from the eyes of the medium to the soul of the observer.

My work aims to focus on what we all have in common — the need to be seen, safe, and soothed — and to invite all observers to a moment of reflection and connection to their inner selves and other people's inner worlds.

Each of the clay creatures can help people resonate with the story the sculpture carries inside. It encourages all the observers to open up to a new view of the human being, a view of Hope, mutual Support, and Help.

Orlando: I make drawings, this is my language. I define my project as a documentary photography project in a way I use drawings as if I am taking pictures.

I am documenting moments, I am capturing emotions visible in singular frames of porn videos I am watching.

It is difficult to say why I make my drawings, there is some internal impulse I guess, the need of communicating and expressing my thoughts, just not being silent.

Ewan and Ky: Our work begins as stories- myths, legends, folklores and science fictions that come together into images, sculptures and performances, which embody/ inhabit the worlds we've created. The art we make is an extension of our relationship, two bodies and minds coming together, and we make it very simply because we enjoy it! It's fun and sillyness layered up with bodily and intellectual pleasures. What's art without a little debauchery? ;)

by WANKY KWEAN (Ewan Hindes and Ky Pegram)

How does your queerness and/or transness intersect with your art practice?

Amy: Reflecting myself, my art practice is a curious, sliding scale of binary-free fluidity and queerness. My work always centres the LGBTQIA+ community and over the years it seems to embolden that more and more unapologetically as I surround myself with community and ease into my own skin alongside a beautiful found family of creatives. A lot of my work is inspired by my relationship with my long-term girlfriend, Venus (yes, cool name) - expressing our artistic selves is how we found the queerest of queer connections, it is another realm of communication.

Gessica: My work is an open representation of feelings, desires for closeness and understanding.

There is not a specific gender represented in the story I am telling through clay; only creatures; “souls of mud”  attempting to be close to one another, to reach out and share feelings, in search of closeness, reciprocal understanding and love.  

Orlando: My project focuses around queer sexuality, something that is naturally part of my trans life experience.

Ewan and Ky: Our practice is predicated on trans and non-binary bodies coming together and birthing art. Alien flesh is torn apart to reveal ancient creatures long forgotten. Themes of transformation and fluidity are inherent in all we make, notions of becoming other are paramount. It is violent, it is horny and it is beautiful.

by Orlando Szablewicz

How have you developed your craft and honed your perspective, particularly as a queer artist/ maker?

Amy: I like to think that the work I have put into growing Queer Arts Collective, Bold Mellon over the past 3.5 years as Co-Founding Artistic Director alongside Emilia has been me honing/developing my perspective as an artist and maker. And regardless of artistic medium, I feel that my ‘craft’ has actually become community. Being able to create platforms for emerging queer artists and collaborating with such rich stories continues to foster such a warm and needed, shared creative growth.

Gessica: I first started to hand-built small creatures representing feelings and emotions during the first lockdown for the Covid pandemic, and since then I have deepened the use of clay to explore my inner world and share with others everyday experiences and beliefs around ourselves and the way of being in this world.

I try to represent the deep and complicated journey of the unconscious from the Wounds of our Inner Traumas to the Relief of Healing.

With time, I have allowed myself to be freer during the creation and each small creature became the “owner of a story”, the gatekeeper of a feeling or a sensation, something that initially was linked to what I might have felt, lived, suffered or wished but that once finished, it became the heritage of a new story, the unique story that the observer would resonate with by encountering with my piece.

by Amy-Rose Edlyn (aka Tainted Saint)

What are you most looking forward to about having your work exhibited as part of the upcoming t’ART Exhibition: Queer Time?

Amy: I am super excited to see the whole curation of this theme in one room and meet the other artists! This is the first (non-Bold Mellon) queer exhibition I will be exhibiting in! I came along to one of t’ART’s pop up art fairs the other month and it was such a wholesome vibe, so I am very much looking forward to experiencing some more of that!

Gessica: I would love to know that people resonate with the stories each creature embodies. I would like to know that they feel touched by them in one way or another.

Orlando: I am happy to be able to show my pictures to the wider audience. I am very excited to see all the art presented at the exhibition and meet other queer artists. I hope it will be an opportunity to become a part of the community.

Ewan and Ky: This is our first public show outside of uni and so we're really excited to start putting our work out in the world. We also can't wait to see all the other work and meet the other queer artists and just have a jolly gay old time!

The exhibition is open at The Outsiders Gallery in Dalston until the 10th November. Find out more here.

---

Amy-Rose Edlyn is a queer, non-binary multidisciplinary artist and theatre maker from Croydon, London. They are Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director of Bold Mellon Collective C.I.C – an award-nominated queer arts company creating and sustaining uplifting trans-disciplinary art platforms for emerging FLINTA creatives. Edlyn also creates experimental, mixed-medium visual and performance art that challenges binaries, centres LGBTQIA+ stories and explores the raw beauty in the distorted human lens under the name ‘Tainted Saint’. Exhibitions include Queer Joy 1 and 2 at Stanley Arts, Runt of the Litter, A Glimpse of Kink at Bateman Street Gallery, Felt Photography, Up to No Good at Richmix and Myssfit Magazine.

Gessica Carbone is a ceramic artist based in London, who first started to hand-build small creatures representing feelings and emotions during the first lockdown for the Covid pandemic, and since then has deepened the use of clay to explore her inner world and shared with others everyday experiences and beliefs around ourselves and the way of being in this world. She tries to represent the deep and complicated journey of the unconscious from the Wounds of our Inner Traumas to the Relief of Healing.

Orlando Szablewicz (they, them) has a Masters degree in Fine Art. They studied at Warsaw Academy of Fine Art. They have worked as a VFX supervisor and Animation Director, and currently they are working as a Character Animator. They are a transgender, afab person. Half of their life they tried to self deny their identity and they are just in the process of transitioning. Although they came out as a transman late in their life (I’m currently 47) they are starting their new life happy to finally be themselves.

WANKY KWEAN (Ewan Hindes and Ky Pegram) are an artist duo who create across a range of media, particularly sculpture and performance, work that explores not only our transness but our relationship with each other as two gender deviants. Drawing from folklore and science fiction, we create stories and worlds and populate them with our creations.