This project was displayed as an installation for my degree show at The Royal College of Art in June/July 2023. It consisted of two sculptures resembling flower creatures that I wore around my body for a live performance twice every day during the show.

It came out of my fascination with flowers and their biology. I am interested in how sex and reproduction manifests in different ways in different lifeforms and whether this can change our human perspective on sex, gender, and identity. This line of thinking is called 'queer ecology'. It led me to do research about flowers and their hermaphroditic existence. I wrote a poem based on my reflections, which formed the basis for my live performance and the crafting of the flower costume/sculptures:

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"She is so effortless

So elegant and generous

She stuns everyone and everything

Never goes out of her way to convince anyone of anything

She has nothing to win and nothing to lose

No battles to fight, no point to prove

She always stays put

Anchored to her root

And we are all so attracted to her

Her big vibrant genitalia

Her irresistible scent

Her life giving nectar

She does not need to beg

Everything around her works to her benefit

She is not anxious

She is perfectly stable

With her pistil and stamen

She can give and receive

Her own babies conceive

All she does is have orgies with herselves and her friends

As they celebrate her ultraviolet limbs

She shows off her beauty

Until her ovary turns fruity

She thanks the birds and the bees

She welcomes the bugs and the breeze

She offers herself with gracious ease

 

Us humans

We don’t remember how we got here

But this situation was a choice

Inside every queer person lives an ancient voice

A memory of the fluid origins of all life

That sends out sparkly energetic waves that glimmer in your eyes

A memory of what was before

This gonochoric game playing galore

Our anisogamous dominance

Our primordial potentiality for never ending change

A morphology so fluid and strange

It still shines through

It still lives in you

 

I need to get something off my chest

I am going through a transformation, not death

Of learning to let go

Allowing myself to grow

 

What if it’s not shameful to be male?

But a shame to be sexual at all?

What if it’s not better to be female?

But better to be monoecious? Bisexual? Self-pollinating?

To surrender like her

To this present moment

To my own beauty and fragility

Without any excuse or insecurity

To appreciate and be grateful for this constant miracle

To stop wandering and searching unfulfilled and cynical

To need something from him or her or them

To put an end to humanity’s mayhem

Of more wants more

A never ending war

Don’t you just want to be free?

Don’t you want to see everyone be free?

 

Everyone you feel threatened by

They feel threatened too

There is no need to fight back

It was never about you

 

The only thing we all have in common

Is that we are all alone

And all together

At the same time

 

What are we longing for?

Why are we trying to escape?

Where do we think this is going?

 

She still only has herself after all her seeds are sown

She will be long gone when her children are grown

 

We have a choice to make

Bodies to make or break

A world to rejuvenate

But we are choosing destruction

Mindless reproduction

Fear, greed and dominance

Refusing to raise our consciousness

Detached from our androgynous origins

Forgetting that we are all here for a reason

Every species, landscape and season

We are all so loved

We are all so needed

We need to concede it

 

Our dimorphic survival strategy

Our illusory individuality

Our need for duality

Is so delightful and so painful

Maybe it is time

To simply be peaceful?"

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