My project on the AA2A scheme at Loughborough University will use contemporary drawing, painting, printmaking and poetry as a means of exploring queer female working class narratives, often inspired by the physical objects and spaces I associate with these experiences and my own upbringing. 

 

This project is inspired by my recent body of work earlier this year titled 'Queer Lovers, Different Faces in Pre-fab spaces' which involved a commission and exhibition funded by Crescent Arts, Scarborough. This series of drawings and paintings used motifs such as the Sharlston red colliery wheel, council housing, camping holidays and and old brickyard, interwoven with mixed media text proclaiming phrases like 'That's how we grew up, lived on a shoe-string, maybe we had nowt, but I had everything'. My AA2A project will build upon these interests and aims to delve beyond geographic locations and further into mental and other physical spaces that are intrinsically linked to being queer and working class through continuing the use of motifs such as abstract mouths, queer bodies and text that reveals fragments of these all too often hidden or overlooked narratives. My thinking and practice often returns to themes of loss, desire, obsession, repetition, the un/maternal and uncertainty, so this is something I expect to appear throughout my project also.