Your work reclaims the term “queer” and interrogates the concept of “alien.” How do these themes connect to your personal experiences and the larger narratives you explore?

CL: I think a lot about the concept of counter-will which is the automatic reaction of someone with ADHD to resist being told what to do, even when the task is something they would normally agree to, which comes up in discussions of disorders like ADHD and autism. For me, it comes from a place of defensiveness because the creation of identity is so fragile; we don’t want anything to influence it, especially things that don’t feel right, to disturb the process of identity-making.

I feel as if the standards of gender have always felt reductive, even as a child. Because I spent so much time in my head, when labels were assigned to me and arbitrary expectations put on me, I felt deeply uncomfortable in my body. Growing up, queerness felt like the right term to hold space for the way I wanted to conceptualize myself in the world. It feels expansive, not restrictive. It is embracing all expressions of you and your body. In my work, bodies never conform to what we expect of them.

Similarly, the term alien embraces all the things we don’t expect, and allows room for the Other to fill in that space. I think alien also has the fun connotation of having lived a whole different experience from everyone else, Unfortunately, it often sparks fear of difference in people that tells much more about the fearful than the feared. In my work, hands emerge out of nowhere, and bodies bend in ways that are unnatural”. These figures shows the power of having walked a different path in life to understand different modes of being that allow new knowledges to arise out of those experiences of Otherness.