Introduction to Queer Alchemy

Queer Alchemy is an installation of experimental ceramic sculptures by St. Louis-based artist Sarah Knight. Knight’s queer and transgender identity deeply inform their studio practice and material choices. Queer Alchemy asserts that all matter is queer in a state of transformation – and it does so by playfully upturning systems of display and ceramic processes. The artist uses this installation to examine value systems we put on objects through their names, labels, and uses, and relates this valuation to the rigidity by which we categorize complex personal identities. Queer Alchemy’s taxonomy – or the system by which things are classified – is experimental and modular, reframing each object through proximity. You will see samples of geologic and ceramic materials in various states of flux, molten rock, and the complete sculptures that they create. This exhibit explores how identities-in-transition create their own ecologically referential systems of “becoming” in a culture that requires language and comprehension for the ineffable realities of queer identities.  

Knight uses found rocks, soil, foraged clay, and natural pigments in addition to artificial steel, processed clay, pigments, and other human-made elements. Display elements are inspired by topography, mineral displays in museums, and traditional art object displays. By connecting transness to these hybridized systems, Queer Alchemy excavates the relationship between fragile geoecologies and the queer and transgender community. Permanently altered by exploitation and persecution, both adapt by transmuting and creating new meaning through entropy, fracture, and disintegration. Alchemy itself is based on the transformation of matter, and Knight uses this concept to create animate, biomorphic, earthly bodies that encapsulate a queer and trans state of flux.

 During recent anti-transgender legislation, Knight’s work shifted to more readily express a sense of joy that escapes persecution with the goal of unearthing lost voices of the queer community. With this influence, Queer Alchemy draws on influences ranging from root pry and Sappho’s poem fragments to the writings of Georges Didi-Hubermann’s Atlas: or the Anxious Gay Science, in which the author posits that “to reread the world is to link the disparate pieces differently…which is a way respecting it, of going over it again or reediting it and piecing it together again without thinking we are summarizing or exhausting it.” The artist removes brokenness and loss from the realm of trauma consumption and into a place of recreation.

Queer Alchemy asks you, the viewer, to stand with and among these pieces, influencing their meaning with your own presence, experience, and observation. This exhibit also asks you to catalog the complexity of your own universe of identities, with or without a language to define their edges. This, to the artist, is the power of the lived experience of queerness. We exist as everything, nothing, frustratingly resistant to systems of order, oppression, and regulation. Queer Alchemy calls upon the ageless undercurrent of transmutation and alchemy in the geoecological world to better protect queer and transgender lives from political attack and erasure.

Queer Alchemy was made possible with the generous support of the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, and Northern Clay Center.