below: The Wrong Bodies text-work as distributed at The Museum's Wrong Bodies presentation, October 2019
Having made the museum’s shadow collection visible, through the creation of the “Wrong Bodies” installation, I felt compelled to make them heard. As I worked with the bodies in the sticky traps, a parallel process began to emerge: the creation of a text which would accompany the bodies themselves, and as that text emerged, I realised that my own voice had metamorphosed into that of the bodies with which I was working.
If my work on the development of ‘Between our words I will trace your presence’ had been a process of writing complete unto itself; taking personal experience as its primary site, here my creative writing was inspired by and bound-up with the process of working with the more tangible materiality of the sticky traps.
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The Wrong Bodies
Bodies without provenance,
We inhabited the museum’s gaps.
Consuming matter, erasing data,
Condemned as pests.
An illegitimate ecosystem,
Acknowledged only by attempts to eradicate our presence.
We are the wrong bodies,
Fixed not in amber, but in glue.
Captured and catalogued,
We become specimens.
A shadow collection.