Please scroll down for individual projects and information about them.

My personal practice draws on my background in theatre, my interest in social and material history, particularly the histories of marginalised lives, staging playful dialogues with queer communities and bodies of the past, present and future. Using the queer performing body as a tool and method for cross-historical enquiry, I engage vocabularies of theatre and drag in intimate interactions with materials, costumes, objects, and other bodies, tracking queer and trans embodiments in the negative spaces of the historical archive.

I create transient, ephemeral works which flicker between durational performance and kinetic sculpture, drag act and ritual, blurring the line between artefact and event. 

DEVISOR / SCENEOGRAPHER / PERFORMER

Kinetic sculpture, durational installation, performance anti-lecture, embodied archive, Fag Ends stages the queer body as a site of un-remembering. This multi-stranded work uses centuries-old tobacco-pipe shards mudlarked from the Thames, interwoven with traces of human physicality and interaction across history, marking out a map of queer time, traced in the surrogate bones of the unknowable dead. Above, more shards, threaded with my hair in lieu of breath, and frozen in water, hang suspended, marking time as they emerge, drip by drop, from the melting ice, each a perverse water clock materialising time and its passing, calling attention to its disrupted flow.

Fag Ends was conceived during the first lockdown, in collaboration with some ghosts at hARTslane, Deptford. It’s since been supported and developed at VSSLS, London, and ONCA Barge, Brighton.

Image credits: Henri T and E M Parry

DEVISOR / PERFORMER / COSTUME DESIGNER

Pricklings is an interactive durational performance which stages the artist as trans saint, queer icon, fetish object, witch’s poppet, a luck charm, a ritual, a process, a test, a game.

Performed in queer club spaces including Riposte and Dialogue, as well as gallery settings including the Prague Quadrennial international symposium of scenography, the work blurs boundaries and troubles distinctions between performer / spectator / participant / object / subject / body / costume / flesh / artefact / archive / event.

Exploring trans embodiment and bodily autonomy through erotohistoriographic practices, religious, historical, medical and magical iconography are remixed and repurposed to create new rituals of becoming, in an intimate spectacle of thickly signifying connection.

DEVISOR / PERFORMER / DESIGNER / PHOTOGRAPHER

In this series of performances-for-camera (or ghosts), an enigmatic cast of eccentric and unruly characters haunt, provoke and flirt with the viewer. Drawing on the historical genre of the ‘Closet Drama’– a play written not to be performed, often associated with women’s writing and politically subversive material – these works engage a bricolage of visual, performative and textual practices aiming at a quasi-dramatic experience, a queerly, hauntingly playful hybrid of performance, document and score.

Closet Dramas is inspired by research into early modern understandings of the body as a fluid, mutable and precariously contingent situation. In Renaissance Europe, the early modern subject’s experience of gender construction, corporeality, and interiority was crucially informed by the regulatory discourses of humoral medicine. Based on maintaining a balance between the four ‘humors’ (blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile), this theory of the body emphasised its unruly porousness and susceptibility to material influences. Meanwhile the emergent science and public theatre of anatomical dissection, alongside the era’s deployment of mutilation and dismemberment as a publicly presented feature of capital punishment, contributed to a culture in which the external and the internal were radically interchangeable, specular and spectacular. In this context, early modern clothing, with its detachable, interchangeable parts, its fluid construct – and deconstruct-ability, and its often over-determined signifiers of gender, class and status, occupied a powerful, and powerfully contested place in the cultural imagination and experience of identity. The complex braiding of materiality, embodiment and performativity through which early modern clothing comes to mean, and to matter, offers a vocabulary of self-fashioning which both speaks to and challenges contemporary identity politics.

Works in this series have been exhibited at the Parlour Gallery, TriangleLGBTQ+ Cultural Centre, ONCA Barge, Lewisham Arthouse, an online exhibition Athletes of the Heart, and are featured in a forthcoming publication Gender on the Transnational EarlyModern Stage (ed. Peter Cockett and MelindaGough, Toronto University Press)

DEVISOR / PERFORMER / COSTUME DESIGNER

E.M. Parry performs as cult favourite drag king / things Mal Content and OK Cupid, with regular appearances on the queer cabaret scene including Bar Wotever, Frankie Sinatra’s Kings of Clubs, John Sizzle’s Pride Showcase, Karoa King, Man Up, Boi Box, The Double R Club, Drag Save the Kings and Moll & the Future Kings drag king take-over at the Sam Wannamaker Playhouse, Shakespeare’s Globe. They were previously a founder member of drag king band Sue,Me & the Company.

Crawling forth from the inky-dark depths of history best forgotten, fuelled by bile, bombast and brandy laced with regret, hapless Jacobethan anti-hero and poundshop Hamlet Mal Content rises to wreak randomised revenge via his chosen weapon: THEATRE. Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt….

Image credits: Henri T and E M Parry