Title: Zero-Hours (The Tour Guides and the Nymphs of the Museum) alternate

Media: Photograph, inkjet print on satin archival paper

Size:  20 cm x 32 cm

About the work:  I use photography's fragmentary nature to craft absurdist gay narratives. By focusing on seemingly mundane situations, I explore English middle-class ambivalence, individualism, and naturalised ideas around what is and isn’t seen as ordinary within this class's collective consciousness. In my images I transform activities and objects tied to a dated middle-class sensibility into queer doppelgängers, then reintegrate them back to their original contexts. In these off-kilter scenes, Isatirise the contradictions that sustain Anglocentric illusions of comfort, which are often reliant on the dehumanisation of those seen as outside of the in-group.

Bio: In Zero-Hours (The Tour Guides and the Nymphs of the Museum), I was interested in how employers reduce employees to extensions of the institution, requiring them to partially detach from their own personhood in order to embody the beliefs and emotions that the company wants to project. The narrative follows a group of older women touring a stately home, a cultural site that romanticises, middle-class ideals of historic upper-class England. In my interpolation the tour guides become homoerotic, their explicit sexuality clashes with their function as an extension of a museum. Here gay sex initially disrupts the guests' expectations of the culture, history, and status associated with this venerated institution. However, to avoid discomfort and maintain their desired view of the stately home, they ignore the disruption, pretending everything is as expected, preserving their beliefs and sense of normalcy despite the reality before them.