• Media

Invocation; a recovery

Jonathan O'Grady

'Invocation; a recovery' is a project that sits at an intersection between queer pasts, mythology and landscape. Histories of settlement and generations of habitation make themselves known in the infrastructure left behind and through the topography of the land; its undulations and forms belie the strata below, composed of a multiplicity of lives. Despite its contemporary form as segmented and divided, the land objectively absorbs and archives all, without refusal.
Through video and photography, the work attempts a recovery of queer experiences so often disqualified from historical canons, but which are maintained in the soil nonetheless. By approaches that utilise formal practices as well as performative actions, a new mythology is proposed wherein past queer possibilities can be embodied again, troubling and challenging these orders and regiments.
The work forms a constellation, where each component unites to form a whole. A guerrilla-style intervention is utilised with some works, where these components are placed back into the landscape, utilising the infrastructure already present there, and occupying spaces both conspicuous and hidden.