Jamie Crewe

‘What do you do when you can’t speak? How do you speak when you can’t be heard? How do you channel power, especially from positions where you can’t or you don’t want to do it in the normal ways?’.¹ In her recent exhibition Defixiones (25th May–23rd June 2024), Jamie Crewe (b.1987) grappled with these questions, drawing inspiration from ancient Greek and Roman curse tablets to explore alternative conduits of agency for marginalised people. Installed in the domestic interior of Radclyffe Hall, a Victorian apartment in Pollokshields, Glasgow, the exhibition featured nine lustrous oil paintings of faces that gazed out directly at visitors FIG.1 – some with indifference, others with defiance – seemingly never letting them out of sight.

The paintings are titled after barbarous names, such as ABLANATHANALBA FIG.2 and BAZAGRA – enigmatic epithets used in ancient rituals to invoke the help of supernatural forces. Nestled in crevices of the skirting boards and tucked away beneath a sofa were crumpled lead sheets inscribed with pleas FIG.3. These appeals were inaccessible to viewers, except for one unfurled on a bookshelf that read: ‘I BEG, I BEG, I BEG…’. The quietness of the domestic space was occasionally broken by the faint howl of an aeolian harp installed on a window ledge. The space seemed to be inhabited by hidden, otherworldly agents. The fixed but seemingly animate gazes of the portraits, the muted words enclosed in folds of lead and the harp strings tensed in anticipation evoked a history of covert channels of resistance in the struggle for social recognition and justice.

The referential nature of the exhibition, which turned to past and pre-existing references to find forms of expression for current political action, is emblematic of Crewe’s wider approach. Her practice is based on the appropriation and subversion of established sources and genres – from ancient myths and folktales to Victorian novels, horror films and poppers training videos – which provide frameworks for the exploration of personal and collective histories of queer and trans struggle and resistance. In Defixiones, the ambivalent medium of curse tablets – objects that were used by oppressed individuals to seek justice, but could also be employed to cause unwarranted harm – was resurrected to address the complexity of reclaiming rights in a neoliberal climate where a positivist, affirmative narrative of inclusion runs the danger of obscuring, as Heather Love has argued, the painful and traumatic aspects of LGBTQIA+ struggles and their oppositional impetus.² In Crewe’s words, curse tablets provided a means to access ‘anti-establishment rectification through a stealing back of power, of force, by the disempowered, whilst holding a volatile potential’.³

A decade after Time magazine optimistically declared a ‘transgender tipping point’, queer and trans scholars, activists and artists have increasingly highlighted the downsides of a myopic focus on visibility in discourses of inclusion that fail to account for the dangers of objectification, surveillance and violence that exposure might cause.⁴ The ethics of trans visibility are a central concern in Crewe’s practice, which toys with the friction between ‘courting and avoiding publicness’, between a desire for recognition and the urge to remain illegible.⁵ This tension is explored in Ashley FIG.4, a 45-minute film that Crewe produced for the 2019–20 Margaret Tait Commission. The film borrows from the conventions of the rural horror genre to explore fears related to public exposure; throughout, the camera movement conveys a sense of haunting surveillance.

The titular character (played by the artist) is convinced that they are being pursued by an invisible threat while spending a weekend in an isolated cottage in the countryside. Travelling shots of the interiors at night convey a sense of a hidden presence lurking in the darkness, while claustrophobic close-ups of Ashley’s body give the impression of impending danger. With Ashley, Crewe explained that she wished to explore what happens when ‘you show the trans person relentlessly, you show the trans person punishingly, you put the camera right in the trans person’s face and you just absolutely rake them over the coals’.⁶ In this way, she draws attention to the violence intrinsic to representational technologies and traditions – such as the horror genre – that have contributed to the objectification and othering of gender-nonconforming bodies.

In an earlier work, the two-channel video installation Pastoral Drama FIG.5, Crewe explored a diametrically opposed strategy to address transness: a ‘Eurydicean methodology’ based on a deliberate withdrawal from visibility.⁷ The work restages two sources in the form of amateur, rudimentary animation: the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and the seventeenth-century operatic interlude Eumelio, a differently gendered version of the myth featuring Apollo and his ward Eumelio that resolves, unlike the original, in a happy ending. Crewe uses these sources as a springboard to address the gendered power dynamic related to viewing and the danger of bringing something vulnerable – be it transness or femininity – to the surface. Eurydice’s retreat into the underworld, which in the original myth signals her tragic disappearance as a consequence of Orpheus’ breaking of his oath, is reclaimed in Pastoral Drama as a manifestation of agency over one’s right to be seen, as a refusal to participate in the objectifying mechanisms of representation. In its exploration of the political viability of invisibility, Crewe’s wilful misreading of the myth can be seen as tapping into the potential of ‘queer opacity’. Defined by the artist Zach Blas (b.1981), this is an anti-recognition strategy that, by making its subjects illegible, resists the reification of ‘difference’, conveying instead an ‘alterity that is unquantifiable, a diversity that exceeds categories of identifiable difference’.⁸

As Peggy Phelan wrote, ‘representation is almost always on the side of the one who looks and almost never on the side of the one who is seen’.⁹ When gender-nonconforming bodies enter the field of representation, they risk continuing to be marked as ‘other’. Trans representation, therefore, should not simply be understood in terms of inclusion within existing structures, but instead requires a radical reworking of binary systems. Crewe enacts this in Pastoral Drama by modelling the characters of Eurydice and Eumelio on her own appearance FIG.6, with masculine or feminine features emphasised accordingly. By moulding the material basis of her body to create the characters, Crewe makes apparent how bodies are artificially coded and how this can be reclaimed to disturb the traditional visual reproduction of gender difference. This refusal to settle for a stable correspondence between bodies and gendered meaning is further rendered through the provisional aesthetic of the work. The characters and settings are made of plasticine, paper cut-outs and found materials that are continuously assembled and disassembled – filmed in a perpetual state of becoming that conveys the transitory nature of identity.

Crewe’s multidisciplinary practice not only wrestles with heteropatriarchal traditions but also mines representational history in an attempt to trace overlooked queer and trans genealogies and establish a transgenerational network of kinship. Two of her major exhibition projects, Female Executioner FIG.7 FIG.8 and the sister exhibitions Love & Solidarity and Solidarity & Love (2020), focused on representations of genderqueer identities found in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels. The exhibitions addressed the queer impulse of turning to the past to find a precedent for one’s experience of gender in the present, simultaneously tackling the struggle of identifying with references that, while providing a form of ancestry, depict gender nonconformity in negative, pathologising or condemning ways. Comprising video, sculpture, prints, text-based works and architectural interventions, these two projects rewrote, misread and appropriated elements from Rachilde’s novel Monsieur Venus (1884) and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) to grapple with the tension between alliance and disidentification with queer and trans histories FIG.9. The sources loom large in the exhibition spaces as simultaneously supportive and antagonising forces against which more hopeful possibilities for queer and trans self-expression and solidarity are imagined.

Navigating disparate references and genres to articulate the complexity of trans embodiments and retrace histories of LGBTQIA+ struggle, Crewe’s layered artistic universe provides us with an oppositional discourse that challenges both heteropatriarchal structures of representation and the reductive, affirmative tokenisation of LGBTQIA+ identities in the mainstream. Addressing the struggle that marginalised people face of having to articulate their subjectivity through the very structures of representation that have contributed to their oppression, bell hooks argued that oppositional discourse must challenge the formulation of identity as singular, in favour of an understanding of the self as the ‘coming together of many “I”s, […] as embodying collective reality past and present, family and community’.¹⁰ By allowing the past to resurface in the present and by embracing a composite understanding of selfhood woven from a multiplicity of voices and references, Crewe’s artistic approach provides a language for individual and collective reparation that transcends the potentially divisive trappings of identity. Her art becomes a relational field in which transgenerational networks of community and solidarity can be forged.