Cultivating our Unbecoming: with Gabrielle Youngleson and Johno Mellish (2021)

Cultivating our Unbecoming: with Gabrielle Youngleson and Johno Mellish (2021)
Diasec
66,5 cm x 76,5 cm

This work was made during hard lockdown, pre-vaccine when the artist was locked in with their grandmother, Gabrielle Youngleson, who had just turned 90. Johno Mellish captured the photograph through the window. The photograph describes the mutual precarity created by the pandemic, a precarity that continues to be so through escalating inequality and the deepening of the climate crisis.

To frame a thing is to decide ‘who is looking’ and ‘what is important’ and reinforces the colonial and patriarchal imagination that we exist as autonomous individuals and not as beings communally created. The frame is deliberately included as part of the artwork along with its shadow so to dispel the fallacy of individualism. The artwork is a gesture towards the fact that nothing exists, nor is created or authored independent of a wider relational ecology, evidenced in this intimate image of the artist massaging their grandmother.