Wells Chandler

The Yellowing

Wells Chandler

The Yellowing

2023 | | 79 × 46 cm

The transgender issue is present throughout Wells Chandlers’ entire oeuvre. Drawing on his own story and using colourful and bright crochetwork, he expresses the pleasure of successfully liberating the real self from the imprisonment of incorrect gender.
Crocheting refers just as much to the feminist craft tradition from the 1970s as it does to the origin of the word ‘queer’. ‘Queer’ comes from the Indo-European root twerk- (which became ‘twist’ in English), meaning oblique and twisted. Wells Chandler explains that “this root is present in the technical process of crocheting, which involves the development of twisting lines of yarn.”

His pieces constitute a body of work that aims to deconstruct art history, one which often posits a universal white, heterosexual, male genus as the norm. He rethinks this view while constructing and reconstructing masterpieces – always with a dose of humour.

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