HANUM
Queeries
My current creative practice focuses on queer as a strategy to subvert structures, concepts, and traditions: developing ‘femme’ as a tool for sculptural language and disruption, and utilizing form to examine experience and reimagine futures.
The series “Queeries” is a place where I also explore queerness as a noun, an identity, and a lived experience. I use this space to connect with and honor queer history and queer ancestors, examine my own experience finding and building a home within queerness, explore the challenges of in/ex-clusion, including place-making, building community, and femme invisibility, and celebrate queer joy and the radical power it creates.
Polarity
I navigate the world with Bipolar II. Being a high-functioning person living with chronic mental illness can be isolating: my ability to perform wellness during high periods of depression makes it difficult for others to understand the severity of my illness. It also makes me doubt the validity of my own illness, and experience a lot of shame and guilt. Using my craft to unmask my mental illness allows me to better communicate my experience with others, creating connection and understanding. It also allows me to clearly examine my experience with mental illness outside of myself, so I can hold and experience it with greater clarity and compassion.
