Essay by Eliza Baker for Contextualising Practice
Foreword
In 2024, the deaths of several people close to me marked a point of rupture in my life and my art practice. These losses destabilised the systems I had internalised, systems that governed not only how I created but also how I lived. My grief revealed the extent to which I had been unconsciously trying to assimilate into normative frameworks of legitimacy, productivity, and visibility – what French historian Michel Foucault would describe as disciplinary regimes (Foucault 1977). Painting, the medium I once considered the most valid or serious, came to symbolise this assimilation. In response, I shifted toward textiles, installation, and ultimately performance—forms that made space for embodiment, intuition, and reality. My works, The Petals: July 2024 and The Mask: May 2025, encapsulate this transitional shift in my arts practice. This essay reflects on the transformation of my art practice through the lenses of queer theory, grief, and embodied resistance. I draw on theorists such as British Australian writer and scholar Sara Ahmed, Cuban American academic José Esteban Muñoz, and American academic and author Jack Halberstam to explore how queerness, temporality, and joy can serve as forms of refusal and resistance. Through this lens, I discuss how my shift from painting toward performance was not simply a stylistic evolution, but a political and personal necessity. The works I developed in response to these ruptures became both a method of survival and a celebration of, as Muñoz coined, queer futurity (Muñoz 2019).
Disciplinary Regimes and the Futility of Assimilation
Michel Foucault’s theory of disciplinary regimes within Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison provides a framework for examining the invisible systems that regulate creative and personal life. Disciplinary power functions through institutions—education, medicine, and employment — to shape bodies and practices that conform to normative expectations (Foucault 1977). Similarly, one can apply this to the gallery spaces and systems. My early painting practice, which I understood as ‘legitimate’, was an extension of this regime. The white cube, a term for a mainstream gallery space first coined by Irish art critic and artist Brian O’Doherty, is framed as a space of neutrality or progressivism but remains deeply embedded in capitalist, heteronormative, and colonial modes of display and validation. It imposes a silent architecture of legibility: work must be framed, professional, and saleable; the artist must be coherent, consistent, and visible (O’Doherty 1986).
In this sense, even avant-garde gestures often re-inscribe the same aesthetic and social norms they claim to resist (O’Doherty 1986). Sara Ahmed, in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, extends this critique to the realm of emotion and social belonging. In her discussion of gay marriage, she notes how the inclusion of queer subjects into heteronormative institutions reproduces the same divisions it claims to dissolve (Ahmed 2014). Within heterosexual culture, legitimacy is conferred through marriage; those who live differently are framed as failures. By offering marriage to queers, Ahmed argues, the state does not dismantle this structure but reestablishes it within the queer community (Ahmed 2014). This assimilation creates new forms of internal division – between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ queers, between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ lives.
Grief ruptures all these systems. In grief, time stutters, language fails, and the disciplinary regimes that previously structured meaning—artistic, personal, professional—begin to unravel. As Love (2007) has noted, Queerness already destabilises normative scripts of family, gender, and futurity; grief intensifies this. To grieve queerly is not only to mourn a person but to mourn the infrastructures—legal, social, aesthetic—that failed to hold that life as valuable (Butler 2004, Love 2007). In the aftermath, one is often left with no clear way forward. The practices that once conferred stability—making work for a gallery, writing applications, performing success—become uninhabitable (Cvetkovich 2012). This overwhelming collapse of legibility necessitates a reassembling of life at its most basic level: how to work, how to love, how to be in the world without submitting to the very systems that erased what was lost (Ahmed 2010).
Queerness, grief, and art do not merely intersect—they co-produce one another in a field of affective excess that resists discipline (Berlant 2011). Rather than a return to legibility, Halberstam suggests this space demands new forms of making and meaning (Halberstam 2011). Perhaps this is where art begins again—not as a return to legitimacy, but as a refusal of its terms. This argument resonated deeply as I reflected on how grief disrupted my ability to perform a structured, legible queer identity. The pressure to produce art that fit within institutional expectations mirrored the pressures to perform queerness in ways that were marketable, palatable, and ultimately disempowering. Grief shattered those illusions. It revealed that I could no longer maintain a way of living or making that sought to fit into a world that was never designed with my survival in mind. What followed was not a pivot, but a dismantling – a necessary refusal to continue performing within regimes that constrained both feeling and form.
Embodiment, Queer Temporality and the Collapse of Linear Time
Grief has a profound effect on one’s relationship with time. In Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place, the concept of “queer time” is theorised as existing outside the logic of productivity, reproduction, and linear progression. Rather than conforming to normative temporal expectations, such as the life trajectory of birth, schooling, work, marriage, and family, queer time unfolds in nonlinear, unpredictable ways (Halberstam 2011). Grief, in its unruliness, aligns powerfully with this queer temporality: it resists being scheduled, measured, or resolved (Cvetkovich 2012). It lingers, recurs, and disrupts. Berlant suggests grief challenges the presumption that life proceeds in a straight line toward healing or improvement (Berlant 2011).
In my own life, the grieving process exposed the brutal inflexibility of the temporal structures that govern much of contemporary life. Within capitalist work culture and institutional education, time is treated as a commodity, something to be maximised, optimised, and never wasted. The nine-to-five schedule, with its enforced rhythms and standardised expectations, leaves little room for rupture. There is no designated space for collapse, for mourning, for the kind of time that grief demands: time that loops, halts, doubles back, and sometimes stands still.
Grief’s temporality is inconvenient. It shows up uninvited and refuses to be ‘moved on from’ within an allotted period. I found that my grief was not something I could bracket off into weekends or evenings; it saturated everything, disrupting my ability to produce in ways that were deemed valuable. It made me painfully aware of how our systems, especially workplaces and educational institutions, fail to accommodate the full spectrum of human experience. There was an implicit demand to return to “normal” functioning, as though grief were an aberration rather than an integral part of life.
What grief revealed to me was not only the inadequacy of these temporal regimes but also the violence they enact. By privileging continuity, progress, and productivity, capitalist time renders pain, rest, and slowness as failures or deviations. In this sense, feeling became a form of resistance, as Hall and Steele describe in Joy as Subversive Defiance. It forced a withdrawal from normative time and opened a space, a queer space, where different modes of being could emerge. In the refusal to “keep up,” to be productive, to get over it on schedule, I experienced something quietly subversive. Grief slowed me down, but in doing so, it also reoriented me. It showed me the possibility of other temporalities, ones that are more humane, more spacious, and more attuned to the fragility of being.
My turn toward embodied practice was a response to this temporal dissonance. It allowed me to slow down, inhabit my body differently, and resist the demand for legibility. The act of making became temporal, durational, and felt. I stitched, constructed, and assembled not to reach a finished object but to remain with process. The work emerged through repetition, improvisation, and care, methods that are often feminised, devalued, or relegated to the domestic sphere (Fraser 2005). Making hundreds of small petals by hand became a way to move through grief (See Figures 1 and 2). I cut, stitched, and shaped each one slowly, sometimes on the floor of my room, sometimes on trains or at friends’ houses. The Petals: July 2024 was portable, able to follow me through the fractured time of mourning, when ordinary rhythms no longer made sense.
This repetitive act offered a counter-tempo: cut, stitch, repeat.
Cut, stitch, repeat.
It grounded me.
Each petal marked a moment spent staying with the feeling, rather than trying to move past it.
I wasn’t trying to create a finished object. The making was the point, a way of remaining with loss. Suspending the petals from the ceiling became an act of quiet devotion (See Figures 1 and 2). When I installed them for our group exhibition Taking Up Space in 2024, they floated, shifted, and caught the light, holding the softness of a gesture repeated hundreds of times. This accumulation of care and attention resists the idea that grief must be resolved or made legible.
Further moving away from painting, in my final assessment in 2024 I did another iteration of The Petals: July 2024 aiming to reflect the relationship between my struggle and making, providing the audience a visual representation of the tension between persevering and creating, and grieving and struggling. This was a pivotal moment in my art practice as I found solace and energy within tactile creation, as well as immense worth in documentation.
Making the Mask: Play, Drag, and Rebuilding from Rupture
I developed The Mask (See Figures 3 and 4) during this period, and it became emblematic of my transformed practice. Rooted in an intuitive process of making, stitching, gluing, and embellishing, it drew visual inspiration from 1990s New York ballroom culture and drag aesthetics. But its making was also deeply functional – I designed it to be portable, light, and manageable to construct from bed during periods of extreme emotional fatigue. It reflected a need for accessibility and a resistance to the demand that art be made under ideal or institutional conditions.
The Mask’s layered textures and performative potential allowed me to experiment with persona and play, two key aspects of queer resistance. José Esteban Muñoz writes that “to be queer is to be utopian” (2019 pg.1), and in making this work, I was actively crafting new imaginaries. I was constructing a visual language rooted in survival, pleasure, and imagination, as Osifo does in The Culture of Resistance, featuring Pleasure and Leisure. Working in this way enabled me to move through grief not by overcoming it but by metabolising it – transforming its effect into texture, colour, and form.
The making process of The Mask was deeply intuitive, meditative, and rooted in community. It was the second iteration in a series of performance-based costumes and public interventions I created, each time exploring how my presence could disrupt or reimagine what’s expected in everyday spaces like parks, clubs, streets, or convenience stores. I approached The Mask without a fixed visual reference, instead allowing the accumulation of source materials, images, artworks, and textures to guide me. Much of the fabric, sequins, and materials were gifted or thrifted, which added layers of meaning around queerness, community care, and resourcefulness. There was also a parallel between repurposing, upcycling, cutting, and redesigning materials, and the theoretical act of deconstructing disciplinary norms (Fraser 2005). The collaborative nature of this process such as asking my friends to take the photos, help document (See Figures 1 and 2), or even try on the mask, created new connections coming out of a time when I had felt especially disconnected. The Mask became immersive, transformative, and shared, people who wore The Mask physically embodied a shift, stepping into a different identity, even if briefly.
Joy became a political force in this process. Not a naive or escapist joy, but as Meyer described a deeply embodied sense of being alive, despite everything (Meyer et al. 2024). As I glued sequins and wire into fabric, I was practising what Ahmed calls ‘happiness as deviation’ – a refusal to align my emotional world with the expectations of straight time or capitalist usefulness (Ahmed 2010). This joy was not about forgetting grief but making space for it in ways that resisted normative timelines of recovery and productivity. The process of making became a queer temporal act, – slow and nonlinear. It allowed for improvisation, repetition, and softness, all of which stood in contrast to the disciplinary academic structures that demand legibility and progress. Crafting became a refusal to be flattened by loss, a reclamation of time and texture, and a radical gesture of presence in a world that often makes queer survival feel impossible.
Joy as Resistance: Reimagining My Practice in a Time of Crisis
In a world shaped by climate catastrophe, ongoing genocide, racial violence, and institutional decay, joy can feel frivolous, or worse, irresponsible. Yet for queer artists, joy is often not a luxury, but a lifeline. For example, Keith Haring’s joyful visual language, developed amid the AIDS epidemic, offers a compelling example of how art can hold grief and vitality in the same frame (Doonan 2021). His bold, energetic line work and vibrant imagery, often created in public spaces like subway stations and city streets, broke down the barriers between high art and everyday life. While Haring addressed urgent political issues, AIDS, apartheid, and homophobia, his use of movement, rhythm, and playful iconography transformed his work into a form of collective celebration (Doonan 2021). Joy, for Haring, was not a distraction from crisis, but a mode of resistance and connection, an embodied politics that insisted on life amidst death (Doonan 2021).
This politicised joy aligns with what José Esteban Muñoz theorises as anticipatory, a reaching toward a world not yet here, a queerness that insists on possibility in the face of erasure (Muñoz 2019). My own shift from painting to performance was not just a formal transition, but a refusal to conform to artistic and social structures that marginalise rest, care, and emotional vulnerability. In embracing more intuitive, embodied, and collaborative modes of making, I began to practise a queer temporality, one that allows space for collapse and emergence in equal measure.
Within this shift, joy became a what Hall and Steele call a ‘relational force’ (Hall and Steele 2024). It emerged from the generosity of peers who shared fabric and sequins, the freedom offered by teachers who encouraged experimentation, and the simple pleasure of constructing something playful with my hands. Making was no longer about production or mastery, but about process, softness, and survival. In this context, joy functioned as resistance to the neoliberal demands of constant productivity and individualism. It allowed me to reclaim time, connection, and presence and to locate value in making that is felt, not measured. As with Haring’s practice, my own embraces joy not in spite of crisis, but because of it, as a refusal to let pain dictate the boundaries of what is possible.
Conclusion: Refusing the Structure, Beginning Again
The grief I experienced in 2024 forced me to relinquish the desire for legitimacy, discipline, and structure. In doing so, I rediscovered a way of living and making that was grounded in queer refusal, embodiment, and joy. My art practice became not just a tool for survival, but a site of possibility. It allowed me to reject normative timelines, aesthetic hierarchies, and institutional pressures in favour of process, collaboration, and relational care. As Foucault reminds us, power is everywhere, but so too are the cracks in its surface (Foucault 1977). Through performance, play, and material experimentation, I found a way to live inside those cracks. Not to repair what was broken, but to begin again on different terms: terms shaped by intuition, softness, and resistance. In embracing joy as a serious, political force, my practice now insists on a future that is not only survivable, but liveable and beautiful.
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