Emmett MacMillen

NonBinary Bod

Gender is flux. Gender is fluid, gender is spectrum. I look at my body and I see an identity that is changing every day. My body is not static, moving through gender expression and identity like a river over stones. Is this what it means to be nonbinary?

NonBinary Bod attempts to capture the feeling of movement that comes with being genderfluid nonbinary. By centring in on certain parts of the body, combining fleeting images of stillness and movement, it can be possible to envision what it’s like to have a gender moving along a spectrum. It also firmly plants nonbinarism under the umbrella of transness, as a gender in movement away from the assigned gender at birth.

With the composition in front of a closet, usually used as a symbol of hidden identity in queer work, it instead intends to evoke the opposite. As a living place for clothing, the closet can be used as a container for the tools of gender expression and allow for the fluidity of gender to exist physically for a person.

This installation was shown at the Lake Country Art Gallery as a part of the pop-up exhibition Under the Skin presented by The Laundry Room Collective from Sept. 29 – Oct. 3 2020.