People

Max Tristan Watkins is an artist and writer born in Canterbury. His practice employs text and image in order to gesture towards injury, childhood, disaster, and (homosocial) desire. Quotation – both visual and textual – is an important tenet of his work, with the commedia dell’arte, MGM dance movies, and Blue Peter being of recent interest. His work toys with camp melancholy, drawing on ballet training to create performances of transsexual aristocracy and shame. His poetry exposes relationships with queer pleading, surrender, ‘again-ness’ and anecdote. The Proud Cut horse protagonist of his recent installations functions as a proxy for a suspended injured child, namely a baroque castrato, who in turn vocalises an autobiographical phantom.