Collaboration between Em Frank https://emfrank.com.au/mutants (Mparntwe/Alice Springs) + Tarzan JungleQueen (Garrmilla/Darwin)

Mutants is an exploration of bodies as a site of coercive social and political control, and the refusal to perform gender and beauty as an act of resistance.

The collaboration began with a three month residency where Tarzan and Em created a series of distorted self-portraits, collaged from images of their own bodies. The images were cut up and glued back together to create emancipated versions of self that subvert mainstream beauty standards and defy binary assignment.

From these portraits, a body of work developed combining ceramics, perspex, posca and poetry collage.

Mutants is a celebration of fluidity and noncompliance. It urges us to comprehend gender as imaginary, flexible, and blurred, as a spectrum of boundless possibilities.

TACTILE ARTS RESIDENCY + EXHIBITION
Darwin, 2023