Sophie Hoyle, Flex, 2022
As part of the AHRC-funded Gendered re-presentations of disability research project led by Emma Pullen at Loughborough University, I commissioned two new artworks from artists Sophie Hoyle and Christopher Samuel, both of whom made their work in response to the data generated by the research project and its wider thematic context.
Hoyle and Samuel's practices explore modes of disabled subjectivity in relation to race, class, queerness and gender.
Produced in collaboration with a commercial photographer, Christopher Samuel made a series of photographs explored the conventions which typically govern the ways in which para-athletes represent themselves on social media, playing with ideas of revealing and concealing.
Sophie Hoyle’s resulting film, Flex, centred intimate conversations with members of the artist’s community, building a picture of the complicated relationship a group of queer, trans, disabled and chronically ill people have with their boxing gym. Over forty minutes, these conversations reveal a constant process of negotiating with the circumscribed gender identities associated with many sports, the politics of competition and nationalism, threats of violence and the promises of safer spaces.
Their commissioned works were presented at a small exhibition, Para-Representations, held at Loughborough’s London campus in September 2022.