My name is Ocean (they/she/it), I identify as both trans and non-binary. I am a maker, performer and DJ.

My practice is orientated towards self-care and collective healing. The work I make is guided by a process of learning and understanding states of the self. Through a grounding in queer and non-binary practitioners my work envisages potential futures that drift away from the ebb and flow of contemporary culture and engrained routes of pain and violence. My creative process is driven by a passion to learn and reflect upon places of emotional hardship and move towards positions of self-love, peace and empowerment.

I understand much of my work as dance. Dancing with a canvas, a surface, a sound, movement, emotion, word. Gestures inscribed onto an object preserved in time as representations of resistance. In my degree show exhibit these acts of dance are preserved through the material forms of photographic paper, canvas, fabric, paint, hair, concrete, latex, silicon, sound waves, and the very infrastructure of the space itself.

This past year I wrote a dissertation titled ‘Beautiful Monsters: An investigation into queer post-human dreaming’. The idea behind this research project was to explore the potential for feelings of hopefulness that lie in artistic visions of the non-human. Hence, grounding my work within the context of other queer and marginalised thinkers and makers who too seek freedom and comfort in imagining worlds and futures beyond our current understandings of reality.

I see art as having a transformative power to evoke love, kindness, care and compassion. These feelings draw me to creativity and inspire me to find community within the shared love for transforming and transcending what queer theorist Jose Esteban Muñoz refers to as ‘the here and now’.

For all sale and commission inquiries please email oceanangelmermaid@gmail.com