Forrest Lawson

Lives and works in Alexandria, VA, USA

Artist statement

Exploring the visual power and material significance of blood and the abject, as it relates to Queer bodies, is the primary focus of my research. Recently, I have become interested in disentangling a homogenized view of homophobia and how my experience with childhood abuse and neglect have informed my practice and (mis)understandings of heterosupremic models of oppression. Physical, emotional, and psychological abuses and my disowned queerness have collapsed on one another and do not operate as mutually exclusive sites of trauma. Concentrating on healing these wounds and gaining further understanding of the weaponized tools of homophobia are informing a new body of work titled The Sissy Boy and Heterosupremacy. Drawing from feminist and queer theories, whereby the personal becomes political, the source of these subjective abuses is explored more thoroughly through sculpture, printmaking, and book arts that are informed by trauma therapies and memory recollection. The fallibility of memory, and more specifically the defensive mechanism that produces this fallibility, is explored further in the use of materiality and imagery that suggest these muddled restitchings. The use of transparency has also become a necessary surrogate for practiced vulnerability within C-PTSD recovery and as specter of a lost past. Likewise, cyclical depictions of self-pleasure relate to self-efficacy and emotional regulation after neglect during developmental years. The process of recall also...

Artwork