This series documents intimacy, fragility and existentialism while examining my own lesbian existence. Set to the landscape of a still-conflicted Northern Ireland and its divided relationship with queerness. In part masquerading myself as others; the idea of the perfect or desired other, an outburst of queer female rage paired with identity issues, toggling to-close to-home with girlhood clichés while numbness and liberation fumble together to create tender environments with an often-bitter aftertaste. Between a purgative and cathartic nature that typically fuels a coming-of-age story, particularly in this regard, the lesbian or sexually divisive female. Backed by the historic visual discourse of years of the pathologized queer and how queer & the negative have been shackled. Exploring queer limbo, relative to the female gaze and initiated by feminist literary text, I use the foundations of the ‘pathologized lesbian’ coupled with mental illnesses relationship to the contemporary lesbian and overlay it within my own queer upbringing, shadowed by my homelands history of dilemmic identity issues in civil war and becoming an adolescent in post-‘Troubles’ Northern Ireland. Exploring identity through a feminist-lesbian lens, blurring, masking and unmasking, I dress as versions of what I fear is desired of me. Weaving through personalities or idealistic versions of the self I use narratives as such as; The heavenly body, queer as ethereal, joining angelic nature and queerness together to disrupt the ‘deviant’ and rough-around-the-edges aesthetic that is typically assigned to queer life or existence. The ‘Suit’ firm and stiff, as lesbians commonly take shape as, the business woman, impenetrable, sharp and unrelenting to bend to societies softness. The feminine mystique, unattainable, lustrous and never really physically all there and other fleeting characters that embody this series as a whole.
Audrey Blue (b.1998) is an Irish fine artist from Derry, Northern Ireland and is currently based in Belfast N.I. Her media include analogue photography, painting, printmaking and other experimental practices. Blue explores the mortal conflictions of anxiety & being an existential queer youth.
This work was commissioned by The Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
