Look at us! Patchworked and embroidered into existence, ready to dance our way out of this gallery.
Aren’t we bigger than beauty?
Don’t judge us like you would any other inanimate work of art. We’re not hanging on a wall or trapped by a frame.
We’re boundless, we’re free, we’re alive. Made from discarded heaps of fabric and forgotten bits and bobs, but filled with feeling, set alight with colour, and bursting at the seams with the stuff of dreams.
We come from lives lived anonymously and incompletely in the margins of the real world and the internet. We are masks for people whose names we don’t know and who we may never meet, but whose stories we’ve come to embody and celebrate. Stories of hiding, isolation, and shame, but also - stories of perseverance, of hope, of connection.
We’re talking to you now as part of a collective - a chorus of misfits who have finally found a way to fit together; the scraps of our scattered lives and secret identities stitched together into one big resplendent love story.
Our faces map this zig-zagging journey towards utopia and adesire to express all that we are and all that we feel. Bejewelled butthole mouths, kaleidoscopic eyes and a riot of phallic objects spilling out of every possible crevice point to all the things we’ve been made to hide away deep inside of us. Every grotesque desire, every illicit thought, every insatiable impulse, protruding out into the world and dazzling under the spotlights.
But enough of all that. Don’t worry about what we ‘mean’ as works of art or what it took to make us.
There are a thousand different ways of looking at us and a thousand different things to see, and don’t be afraid to come close.
See us; and we’ll do the same for you.
- Dilsher and Mansher Dhillon
