I am an artist who works mainly with craft-based media, often in relation to collections and archives. My practice often explores marginalised, and particularly LGBTQ+ lives and how they own been included or excluded from museum interpretation.
Previous projects have included Queering the Museum which explored how Birmingham Museum could incorporate queer lives into its displays. Interventions included pairing up historic ceramic bears with a taxidermy otter. When you realise that in gay bars bears are large hairy gay men and otters their slimmer counterparts, then these four objects become a furry gay disco, and the museum a more fun place to be. While this may feel irreverent, I think it sheds light on the role of curators in selecting how objects are combined to tell particular narratives, and how this privileges some people over others.
Closer to Huddersfield, I worked with the Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery at the University of Leeds to explore how oral histories from the Brighton Ourstory Archive could be embedded in everyday
Losing Venus
In , Captain James Cook set sail for the Pacific on the Endeavour. For more than years, Europeans had explored the Pacific, but much of it remained unknown to them. Cook’s voyage was supported by both the British Admiralty and the Royal Society with the initial aim of recording the transit of the planet Venus – named after the Roman goddess of love – from Tahiti. By observing the passage of Venus between two different points on the Earth’s surface, it would be workable to calculate the distance from the Earth to the Sun, and from that the size of the Solar System.
In Britain, Cook was seen as a national hero. In Australia, and to a lesser extent in Unused Zealand, Cook was celebrated in monuments, statues, street names and postage stamps, and elevated to the role of founding father. The anniversaries of his landings were commemorated, emphasising the belief that his arrival was the gesture at which the national story began. This view has been challenged, particularly amongst Aboriginal Australians, who critique the narrative of European ‘discovery’.
The Cook Service (
Matt Smith
A native of Northampton, England, Smith grew up with the intent of having a career in football, but an injury led him to the less hazardous pursuit of theater. After appearing in various London stage productions and studying drama in college, he made his TV debut in two adventure-oriented adaptations of novels by Philip Pullman, "The Ruby in the Smoke" (BBC, ) and "The Shadow in the North" (BBC, ), both starring "Doctor Who" regular Billie Piper, in a bit of coincidental foreshadowing. Smith won more notice with his role as researcher Danny Foster on the government-steeped show "Party Animals," and worked again with Piper on an episode of her sultry series "Secret Diary of a Call Girl" (ITV, ). Although Smith's scenes as the younger version of Ralph Fiennes' gangster character in the lauded and darkly humorous indie thriller "In Bruges" () were cut, greater things awaited him. Cast as the successor to David Tennant's immensely popular Tenth Surgeon, Smith first appeared as the youthful bow-tied Physician Who in early , and went on to win over skeptical fans with his enthus
The “straight actor for a gay role” debate has come back again.
Former Doctor Who star Matt Smith is gearing up for the release of his biopic of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, but some contain expressed criticism of him in the role.
Mapplethorpe was a celebrated photographer known for his homoerotic photos. He liked to depict naked men to state male beauty and vulnerability. That said, he also enjoyed photographing nature shots and flowers as adv. Plus, he’s known for his great friendship with Patti Smith, the mother of punk rock, and he photographed a scant of her album covers too.
But the conversation of straight men playing gay roles strikes again, and this time in the direction of Matt Smith. The actor then recently defended his work, according to Indie Wire.
“I consider your sexual orientation, or your sex and your choices outside of labor, shouldn’t influence — in either way, positive or negative — what happens,” Smith responded. “So, to me, it doesn’t matter if you’re gay or straight. That has no beari