Whistling kites

This photo essay reflects on almost a decade of nightclub and visual-arts-based performance practice. It reflects on changing relationships between the author/performer’s body, the materials they adorn it with and their critical motivations for doing so. It reflects on the tension and differences between producing work for the nightclub and for more traditional fine art contexts. The essay looks back at the author’s uptake of readymade kites in costumes for drag and cabaret style performance in Sydney’s queer underground. It maps the emergence of the kite as symbolic of tension, resistance and grief in their oeuvre, within which themes of ecological collapse, ecological lament, materiality, queerness and wildness commingle.