Days of Isolation: Queering a Pandemic - Playing Myself/Selves

During the UK lockdowns and days of isolation I retreated to my temporary home studio in Norfolk, to continue a project originally started in 2019, initially titled The Unknowing...X (playing myself/selves). A project that builds upon an established internationally recognized practice as a photographic artist where the work could only be described as autobiographical. This practice has resulted in a sustained and focused body of work since 1994 when I was diagnosed HIV positive. Since that point, I have used myself almost entirely as the sole figure in the images, a way of articulating my experience as a person living with HIV. Developing a personal narrative for nearly three decades now, one that resists a definition of the medicalization of the body. We might think here of work by Mark Morrisroe or DavidWojnarowicz, although I have been very fortunate to have lived so long. Initially told I had a life expectancy of approximately ten years or less, twenty-eight years later and with a normal life expectancy, I find myself reviewing and rewriting the self to articulate potential future(s). Playing myself/selves is my most autobiographical project to to date, and marks a significant shift in the methodology for producing work and was originally an attempt to move away from the narrative of HIV. A playful and joyous process, although with outcomes that could be said to have a brooding, underlying dark humor about them. This new process of working I call ‘unknowing’ has led to a subconscious act of image making, drawing on previous lives lived, memories, and the influences that have shaped my practice and my world, telling the story of my life through a series of self-portraits. A form of playing the different selves and personas inhabited through my life. This process required delving into a massive adult dressing up box, creating multiple new individual personas to imagine what the future might hold. On reflection, rather than moving away from HIV I can clearly see the project builds on and responds to the success of the medication that, as I fast approach sixty, I’m able to be thinking about retirement and a life beyond. In the images I’m playing at being myself or more accurately a mash up of previous roles. The process in making the new work was a shift away from planned and researched outcomes of previous projects to literally in habiting a space of ‘not knowing’. Not just not