Artist Name: Ella Morreale
Title: L can also stand for
Medium: mx pigment on silk chiffon and cotton, polyester voile, black canvas, thread
Year: 2024
Artist Statement:
“The television show The L Word wants to overcome and replace the “backwards history” of lesbians with a sunny and optimistic vision of gay women. The makers of the obnoxious and infectious Showtime soap would love, in other words, to redefine lesbian by associating it with life, love, leisure, liberty, luck, lovelies, longevity, Los Angeles, but we know that L can also stand for losers, labour, lust, lack, loss, lemon, Lesbian.” - Pg. 95, Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (2011)
This piece is an homage to one of my favourite theorists Jack Halberstam. In The Queer Art of Failure (2011) Halberstam states the importance of an archive of resistance that “does not speak in the language of action and momentum but instead articulates itself in terms of evacuation, refusal, passivity, unbecoming, [and] unbeing.” (129). They believe that “a feminism grounded in negation, refusal, passivity, absence, and silence, offers spaces and modes of unknowing, failing, and forgetting as part of an alternative feminist project” (129). My identity has been formed through my failure to conform. I am a loser, I will never win my white picket fence and I frequently come in second or third place, I am lustful and I own up to my desire, I have lost and therefore lack and therefore have become undone, I have certainly put in a lot of labour to be here, I am as sour and skeptical as a lemon, and that what’s makes me a Lesbian.
I chose to create this piece for the library because the library is a space for research and quiet reflection. Through translation of the page, the text, and the research into textile, I am referencing a reflective state and devotion to my study. Simultaneously, I am referencing the mind in a bodily way through flesh tones, brain chemistry, and soft texture. I am stitching a picture of the inside of the head as all this theory I am reading floats around it. This quote by Halberstam sticks with me and plays over and over again on loop since I read it. I stitched it on in black like ink tattooed to my brain. The window symbolizes passivity and identity, transparency and what is obscured, openness or what is closed off (“Who is open-chested? And who has coagulated?” (Björk, Stonemilker)). The stitches are the feelings that pass through the window membrane, from the inside to the outside and from me to you.
Works Cited
Björk. “Stonemilker” Vulnicura, One Little Indian Records, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQEyezu7G20
J. Halberstam. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press, 2011.