James Wilde is a visual artist working with photography, installation and text.
Moving between the night, shame and the queer image, Wilde’s practice draws upon English histories, and the Gothic, as a way to materialise the effect of shame and rural queerness through photography, installation, writing and performance. Looking closely at the photographic and its visual potential to enact a feeling of both fear and intrigue, his work seeks to harness an agency, where a deeper analysis of shame is uncovered through visual correspondence, scale and the play between private and public interactions. Photography here stands in as a visceral medium and suggests an exchange between the image and the observer. Within his practice, Wilde often works with the limitations of the medium, being pulled in by failure or chance, to then subsequently fall into these spaces of uncertainty. Rendering a poetic analogy to marginal spaces, being on the edge and the space of the night too.
For this residency, they will focus on the ongoing research that started during their MA at the Royal College of Art, London. He intends to use this residency to explore topical questions of what a definable masculinity is? How can photography implement a change in judgement towards marginalised queer people, especially during adolescence? And how can we amplify queer voices within communities after the pandemic and recent government legislations that threaten our exposure and awareness of histories and futures?
