Chloe Knight
Artist Catalogue
Virtual Exhibition
i.llegible
This work is centred in the concepts of secrets, queerness, metamorphosis, language, and translation. These ideas are grounded with the materiality and imagery of fungi and the mycelium network. Through linking these concepts with such a versatile organism, I am placed into the position of questioning the very binary structure of which mankind has imposed upon the natural world. I consider the difference between that which is “legible” and “illegible” through the lens of heteronormativity and how the “illegible other” could ever be translated into the canon.
In working with the materiality of fungi, an organism associated with the strange, the mysterious, and the “other” I, in turn, learn to adjust myself into an understanding of the illegible, that which is perceived as inaccessible due to the limits of haphazard binary categorisation over the definitively non-binary state of the universe. As a person who identifies as queer, I have always felt restricted by our humanly attempts to label and categorise nature and ourselves. In this I fear we may have associated our binary knowledge with unilateral truth and, in the process, limited our understanding and hindered our progress. The only true constant in the universe is metamorphosis.
These themes and central ideas are explored throughout all the pieces in my work. I draw out the concepts of illegibility and text in the tapestry of threaded words; a con-language I created to work alongside the more fungal elements of my exhibition that mimic the mycelium network, forming an interconnection between the tapestry and paper installation. My paper installation is a wall of mushroom paper that serves as a deconstructed book of sorts, exhibiting the various textures, shades, and scents of fungi transformed and translated into the medium of paper. The woodblocks of additional threaded words serve as “keys” into understanding the layout of the tapestry while the woodblock prints offer additional illegible information towards my own identity. These works serve as a translation of my understanding of the universe and myself, and the interconnections in between. They act as illegible objects of my own creation, extensions of myself in turn. They are a part of my illegible self.
“Legibility is a construct taken for granted far too often.”