Puce Felling
╵〢 he\him,┊they/them┊, w╎e╷etc ╵〡╷ ♡ ⚭ ☄
As a non-binary queer who was raised in a time of same-sex marriage debates and emerging trans visibility in the media, Felling’s identity places him into a shared narrative with other people whose private lives have become public subject. By documenting the cycles of trauma, pathologization, shame, and hope that comes with queerness, Felling establishes an iconography of his experiences. He performs and creates installations that use these icons to map his presence in an ever-shifting sphere of politics.
His work comes from a context of crafting and domestic maintenance. Crafting practices were passed down to him by his maternal family and now holds significance because of his own dis/connection to the womanhood he was assigned. By making clay vessels, dyeing fabric, quilting, embroidering, drawing, and building domestic spaces, he remodels his own historically charged experiences into new settings - often bathrooms, bedrooms, and kitchens: places of personal performance. It’s here he uses his own body to transcribe his physical and emotional narratives into tender and saccharine imagery – imagery that comes from reconciling his position within a history of women crafters, his own gender, and his queerness.