31 July - 24 August
feltgrad award 2024
FELTdark
Aidan Hughes
Breathing Room
Hughes’s body contracts and expands, sprawling with distortions, both highlighting and subverting the form. The borders between flesh and technology are both at war, and working in seamless unity.
A love letter to the action of inhaling deeply from this brassy miasma of whirring fans, lithium batteries and copper circuitry, Breathing Room encapsulates the actions of stretching out, into ambiguity; the viscous interstitial space created by the intersection of flesh and technology. The queer, abject and often misunderstood space formed and forming within this intersection is metamorphic and vague, serving as no-mans-land to some, and sanctuary to others.
Alienation robs humans of breathing room, so from where do we draw breath?
Dominant societal forces attempt to drive individuals into seclusion or secrecy, establishing a framework for the creation of symbiotic relationships between those that are marginalised and the spatial potential of technology. Technology grants that space to move. Marginalised individuals may find solace within these ambiguous technological spaces. Concurrently, the structural and cultural reformation of these spaces occurs through the influence of their inhabitants. They serve as reciprocal generative spaces, resulting in a dynamic interplay where both are mutually transformed.
Dissolving, reshaping and obscuring the flesh, Breathing Room aims to embody the utilisation of the space facilitated by burgeoning contemporary digital technologies. As the space is filled, it leaves an impression upon the human, as does the human leave their impressions upon it. Breathing Room aims to offer a peek into a new form of raw, everchanging symbiosis.
Artist Bio
Aidan Hughes is an artist working and living on Kaurna Country. Growing up on the Yorke Peninsula, Hughes frequently moved between the homes of his spiritual mother, and skeptical father. This upbringing, coupled with an irrevocable queerness profoundly shaped his perspective and artistic voice.
From a young age, Hughes gravitated towards technology, finding solace and refuge within the digital. This deep connection to technology and digital spaces is a recurring theme in his work, as he explores the intersections of flesh and technology, and the transformative potential these spaces hold for marginalized individuals.
Instagram: @aidanhughes.online
Website: www.aidanhughes.online