| tash brobyn |
| My name is Tash Brobyn (they/he), and I'm a multidisciplinary artist living and working on unceded Wangal, Gadigal and Bidjigal Land. Creating across a variety of mediums including ceramics, painting, printmaking, and zines, my artistic practice focuses on exploring queerness through the realms of biology, sci-fi and fantasy. My works seek to create worlds that audiences can become absorbed in, surrounding themes of dichotomies, dissolution of binaries, and metamorphosis. I am often drawn to fictional worldbuilding as a technique to explore my own experiences of gender, sexuality, and neurodivergence, and as a way to examine queer resonances in narratives. Through subversions and explorations of tropes I interrogate histories of queer representation in science fiction and fantasy popular media. My creations are also highly influenced by my study of biology and fascination with living things. In my practice I investigate the inherent queerness of organisms as they resist fixed categorisation through science and plurality of the natural world. I have recently been experimenting with techniques to combine my painting and ceramics practices to create objects and creatures that straddle dichotomies as a material extension of this theme. @star_creature.jpg |
29.5 x 26 x 9.5cm, 59.4 x 42cm (5x), 17 x 7 x 3.5cm, 25 x 24 x 2cm, 25 x 21 x 2cm, 11.5 x 18 x 2cm, 10.5 x 18 x 2cm, 10.5 x 8 x 2cm, 18.5 x 14 x 2cm, 18.5 x 6.5 x 2cm, 30 x 11.5 x 2cm
'Cygnet' reveals the experiences of belonging and isolation of a shapeshifting alien living amongst humans. Through this Tash interrogates the trope of the asexual, nonbinary, and Autistic coded alien in popular science fiction media, investigating the dichotomous roles these characters play as simultaneous sources of kinship and alienation for many ace, genderqueer and Autistic people. These characters are usually presented by the narrative as the 'other' in contrast to the 'normal' protagonists, reinforcing harmful logics of what experiences are considered 'human'. 'Cygnet' reframes many of the artist's own experiences through a speculative, science-fiction lens, as a subversion of this trope.