Artist Statement:

“Stemming” is a series which attempts to visually represent a hidden, yet everchanging body. The body of the artist. 

A medium of grape stems, garden beans, lunaria seed pods, and feathers, this project turns the body inside-out, a discourse between paper shadows and an anatomy that is both fluid and scarred. 

Here, a body is not unlike the past and future moon, a body in phases… a body revolving. 

Here, a body listens: to a language of non-linear alphabet, undefined… a body of speech strange and mesmerizing, burdened and haunted. 

Here a body dances, plays, dreams… severs off its limbs… sutures its own holes (the gallery seldom shows the Scar, the Damaged Tissue, why is this?). Here, a body stems from the bodies that came before… a fantastic sprigging beast… a canvas, a carving. 

In the words of Angela Chen, “representation not only reflects, but actually changes reality.” As a nonbinary/genderqueer artist, it is often difficult for me to articulate my embodied experience without having a resonating vocabulary to speak with, one that feels both authentic and understood. This way of being is there in my chest, my every extremity, there and real, yet remains almost unspeakable beyond the boundaries of skin. “Stemming” is a pathway to articulation and exploration, born from transformed matter. It is here to invite multiplicity and possibility into queer body language; here is evidence that many things can be true at once. 

About the Artist:

Cameron Finch [Cam/she/they] is a cross-genre writer, editor, reader, artist, and collaborator. Cameron’s writing has appeared in The Adroit Journal, The Common, CRAFT, Electric Literature, Isele, Michigan Quarterly Review, Tiny Molecules,The Rumpus, among others.