Louise Benton in conversation with ARTIQ, discussing Queer Frontiers: Queer Myths, Queer Futures, and the creation of Apparition of a Sacred Vessel, a limited edition print raising funds for Rainbow Railroad.

In your practice, you use the visual language of Catholicism to tell contemporary stories of sexuality and pleasure. How do you find the balance between such distant worlds?

I think Catholic visual language is actually so specifically tailored to show pleasure, to the point that even gruesome images of saints being disemboweled or grilled show them looking absolutely thrilled about it. Traditionally, the aim is to persuade the viewer that they too can undergo any extreme of pain and still emerge in bliss if they have sufficient faith. An example of this that I adore is Bernini’s sculpture, The Ecstasy of St Teresa, which sits in the Cornaro Chapel in Rome- the sculpture shows the moment an angel appears to the saint in a vision and pierces her with an arrow. Her expression is so overtly orgasmic, Bernini is likely playing on the knowledge that that is the highest level of pleasure the average chapel visitor will relate to, divine apparitions being less commonly experienced. Theres a crossover between the religious and the sexual here that I find to be a really rich and human mode of representation, that I’d like to harness and give contemporary stories that same power.

Can you tell us a bit more about the inspiration and creative process behind Apparition of a Sacred Vessel, the work you've created for this year's exhibition?   Sex toys have been a recurring motif in my work for a while because I think as objects, in a purely formal sense their materials and shapes are really sculptural and sensually engaging, just by looking at them you imagine what that material feels like. But they also have this whole weight of association, despite being often quite perversely childish plastic toy objects. Theres shame, or pain, playfulness and freedom, love. In my broader investigation of catholic imagery and visual language you see instruments of pain, martyrdom that result in rapture and bliss. The dialogue between the conservative and the kinky is so broad: where we have an item like a whip as a torture device versus something designed to thrill, I think you capture something so much greater about people and desire, and the tension between human desire to believe but also to experience. Ultimately the end game is pleasure, whether eternally in heaven or in that moment of gratification. Apparition of a Sacred Vessel is the presentation of that object of ‘earthly desire’ in a divine realm, I’ve been looking at church and chapel architecture and the forms nod to the baroque of counter reformation art, where the church loaded every shape, figure and form in the sacred space with emotional, manipulative impact to keep their followers faithful. It’s a questioning of rapture, and what does that mean to a person living here and now. And it’s a playful challenge to the seriousness or solemnity of the church’s teachings. Does that still have a place, and by subverting things we ‘understand’ already, can something more true, or real appear?

How does Christian mythology become an efficient tool to narrate the stories of contemporary queer culture?

The stories we tell within religion, christian or otherwise, are full of transformation and miracles. To me, queer culture centres on freedom and fluidity, and a visual language that aims to amplify faith and belief in a world where angels appear with divine news, or saints perform miraculous cures and apparitions, is well suited to contemporary stories that are not constrained to repressed histories. The contradiction of the church being the source of a lot of these repressed history only makes it a more interesting space to explore and subvert. Theres already an existing tradition of reclamation of power through bestowing new meanings on old ideas, with various icons of Christian history being repurposed within queer culture- Saint Sebastian for example, who features in the stained glass panel that is being shown,  is traditionally favoured by artists as a figure on whom to display prodigious skill at painting homoerotic musculature, on account of being shot by arrows shirtless and tied to a post and somewhere along the line hit cult status as a sex symbol.

You work with a multitude of media. Is the medium itself an inspiration for your visual stories?

Material can often hold as much significance as subject, and what better way to deconstruct our structures of worship than to reform the stone, clay, glass and metals that built it. When we see stained glass for example, regardless of what it depicts, we are immediately placed within a church context. I like the idea that the viewer is given cause to reassess their immediate associations when they get closer and look at the work, hopefully coming away with something more truthful or relevant to them. On a purely personal level, exploring and learning new materials and techniques is one of the most exciting parts of my process.

Images courtesy of ARTIQ 2023