Regulars At The Queer Hut
Cyanotype prints, digital print, 2020-2022
The Queer Hut is a simple structure made of vertical oak railway sleepers and a slanted rusty wrought iron roof. It stands on its own along a disused railway track in the Cambridgeshire countryside. After I stumbled upon the hut, I adopted it, named it The Queer Hut and initiated a self-assigned artist’s residency – one without ties, obligations and preconceived expectations or ideas. Instead, this oddity of a hut offered open doors and open windows, all opening up onto an open path, leading to a two year period of intense experimentation and making, responding from my perspective as a queer man to nature and collapsing ecological systems.
The hut also became my muse and I photographed its structure as nature changed around it. Faces in the oakwood sleepers became my company, my imaginary friends, the regulars that were always there, like regulars in a queer bar.
I honoured my new friends in a series of queer-blue cyanotype portraits, exposing faces hand-cut out of negative film.
During this self-assigned residency I recorded birdsong in the surroundings of the hut (used in the video The Other Side of the Hedge, 2021), wrote and developed To Step Outside, a text-based live work first performed in the group show Reality and its Disorders (2020), made an archive of stereoviews, writing and video recordings – aspects of the project as yet to be assembled, edited and shown.
Nine prints from Regulars at The Queer Hut framed collectively were included in the exhibition The Spots That Never Went at Photofusion (2021). Prints from Regulars at The Queer Hut were include in an online Alternative Processes Pride exhibition curated by Caleb X Cole (April 2022).
Regulars at The Queer Hut (1-4), hand-printed cyanotype prints on Arches Platine, size 8.3cm x 10.8cm
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