Utopian Potentialities: Towards Collective Liberation Through Crip, Queer, and Divergent Signifiers in Sculptural Public Art

Public art has tremendous potential to affirm the lived experiences of minoritised people in public space, to foster intersectional solidarity, and to agitate towards collective liberation. The objective of this practice-led research project is to develop a Creative Methodology for the imagination and creation of public art that alleviates alienation and/or affirms minoritised people in public space by providing legible signifiers of divergence from normativity. Public art typically addresses an imagined normative citizenry, omitting or even alienating individuals and groups whose experiences of public space might diverge from dominant frameworks of participation. Such frameworks are defined by categories such as race, gender identity, sexuality, impairment, and socioeconomic status. In response, this research seeks to develop a Creative Methodology for creating public art that signifies intellectually accessible figurative depictions of divergent lived experience to provide recognition and affirmation to people who experience public space as alienating. The research thereby advocates for an intimate, autobiographical approach to the development and creation of public art that prioritises specificity, lived experience, and individual agency. This approach rejects conventions of public art commissioning that enables an established artist to speak as an “expert” or representative on behalf of an entire community or identity group that ignores the multiplicity of intersectional diversity. Strategies utilised in developing this Creative Methodology have been adapted from the Radical Model of Disability, The Neurodiversity Paradigm, and community-established gender affirmation protocols to guide the creation of public art which affirms trans, queer, disabled, and neurodivergent people in public space. This approach resists demands for respectability, reductivity, and normative palatability in the expression of “non-normativity” in public art. The predominantly sculptural studio outcomes of this practice-based research engage with the materiality of classical forms of public art—including bronze and marble—to critique public art’s historical and contemporary associations with prestige. These “prestige” materials are reappropriated quasi-public resources such as “love-locks” or abandoned “city-bikes”, which are transfigured by traditional western sculptural processes such as metal casting to create both propositional public artworks and works that examine queer, neurodivergent, trans, and/or crip experiences of the public realm. This research project interrogates conflicting attributes of representation in public art—such as recognition, safety, legibility, performativity, abstraction, and figuration. It positions lived experience, agency, generosity, vulnerability, and accessibility as guiding principles for avoiding tokenism, reductivism, identarianism, and homogeneity in the materialisation of public art This project contributes to the fields of trans studies, disability studies, public art, and visual arts practice by comprehensively examining accessibility and legibility through lived experience. It also proposes new ways of navigating the representation of non-normativity in public art while avoiding the perpetuation of harm and alienation of artists and audiences in the commissioning process for new artworks for public space.