Zoë Sydney works with and around the boundaries of the body concerning sexuality and gender. With a Bachelor’s degree in physics, her practice is informed by a deep curiosity about structures and systems. As a queer artist, Sydney recognises the role of art in hisoricizing and legitimising histories of gender and sexuality, and the power of art to destabilise these categories.
Queer Fabrications is a series of portraits that aim to develop a new language of the portrait as a performance. A portrait is often thought of as a ‘representation’, a word that has become important for marginalised communities in struggles for visibility and acceptance. However, the shifting experiences, language and identities of queer communities mean that accurate representation is impossible. For Sydney, performance portraiture allows these works to embody the relational nature of queer identity, rather than a static representation. Using found and made costumes and videos, Queer Fabrications references traditional portraiture while rethinking what portraiture means. Like the queer body, these portraits have been found, transformed and remade into something that defies categorisation.
