CJ Mahony

                                              

                                                                                                                                                                                                                               


                                                                                                                                                                                       
                                             

They play, familiar, familial. Dominant, docile, overbearing emotions haunt these objects that I doubt and dote upon.
It started on a residency. I went with a proposal to re-make the rocks I remember from my childhood. A rock collector’s collection, forgotten.
Now I use my dumb versions that resemble children’s toys more than things dug from the earth. I play and re-play dislocated rituals of detached attachment.
Slow. I am slow moving in my thoughts. My research is progressive revelations of information informed by my practice of making. It is in the practicing that I reflect and then contextualise.
I use these objects to activate dramatic spaces. I imagine queer forms of attachment and kinship. These unstable arrangements enact shifting identities and unearth past and potential future narratives.
Slowly, I am creating fictional spaces for modelling new forms of relatedness.


An essay by Pheobe Blatton called Keeping Up Appearances, charts the early stages of this process in the Mining for Certainty publication.
With thanks to FLACC, Belgium