Comforter
This project is part of an ongoing series, and was developed with support from Open Space Victoria.
A surreal, oil-based composition features two figures embracing each-other, uncomfortably in what should seem like a comfortable situation; partially covered by a quilt. The relationship between the two figures is left up to interpretation, but it is implied that they are close, expressing visceral emotional reactions, and are grossly morphed into one-another. Using the concept of “care” as a symbolic, revolutionary act, criticizes the normalities of living in heteronormative societies — the fear and the discomfort of it — and then to illustrate the importance what being openly queer means to many.
The installation is composed of several “found” materials; my grandmother’s quilt, second-hand felt, the trimmings from a discarded baby blanket, and embroidery thread gifted from friends.
Notes from Dani Neira’s curatorial essay for Queer Futurities: Holding Area:
Cassia Powell’s comforter explores the more ambivalent side of care and relationship. A mixed media installation consisting of an oil painting and quilt, the work is equal parts tender and uneasy. Two figures hold one another in a tangle of green-hued limbs, as a web-like quilt extends beyond them and embraces their visitor. Saturated with intimate gestures and soft fabrics, I think of the necessity for spaces of comfort beyond the confines of heteronormativity, and of the labour involved in this form of worldbuilding. By stitching together the utopic desire for queer relationality with ambivalent affect, Powell constructs a non-place which shapeshifts from spiderweb to safety net, depending on how one interprets the ambiguous relationship of the figures. It is through an “affective excess”, that comforter both critiques the heteronormative present and hints at something ‘extra’ beyond the everyday. In holding contradiction so tenderly, Powell creates “an affective enclave in the present that staves off the sense of ‘bad feelings’ that mark the disjuncture of being queer in straight time.”
