The Weather and What Is explores Burgess’ lived experience as a lesbian woman within a dualistic society, working to dismantle dominant Western narratives that marginalise queer, embodied, and ecological ways of knowing. It challenges reductive notions of the woman’s body as solely reproductive or passive. Instead, natural desire, time, and othered temporalities are foregrounded—spaces where nature and queerness meet.
Engaging a visual motif of hyper-cropped images of her body, garden, or the sky, this exhibition spotlights the essential, innate patterns found across both nature and a lesbian experience, as well as historical representations of humanity, as found in Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. This project is a convergence of both Burgess’ studio practice and ongoing research, particularly drawing on the ecofeminist writings of Val Plumwood, queer ecology, and Bosch’s surreal ecologies. At its core, The Weather and What Is makes central a lesbian experience within a world shaped by dualisms—mind/body, nature/culture, useful/redundant, productive/wasted, man/woman.
Image: Olive Burgess, The Weather and What Is. Image courtesy of the artist.
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