Display of Affection No.4 - Soft Opening

Artist: Luke George

Medium: macramé, 576 metres of mariners rope, wooden rods, photograph
Dimensions: 2000 x 1200 x 500
Mouth: Mark Binette

Exhibited:
SEP 2022 THOTFUL, The Bearded Tit (Redfern)
OCT 2022 Craft Contemporary 2022, Hope St Radio (Collingwood)

Photography: Joseph Mayers

Obsessed with rope as a medium, Luke entangles craft with kink to playfully unpick social tensions and connectivity. A kind of hard-soft. Through the DISPLAYS OF AFFECTION series, Luke explores queer social choreographies and the queering of public and private spaces. The installations and interventions consider the fragility and temporality of queer intimacies, glimpsing traces of bodies lingering and loitering in space and time; non-verbal dances of anticipation, tensions and subtle signals; weaving desire-lines through unsuspecting spaces.

For this series, Luke considers the potential for different types of masculinities through the qualities of beauty, intimacy, connection and care. The attention is on the perspective of the sub/ject (‘bottom’) and their gaze back at the viewer. Luke’s role and responsibility as artist (‘Rigger’), is to collaborate with his sub/ject, supporting and sustaining them, seeing to their needs and desires, as well as his own.

DISPLAY OF AFFECTION #4 - SOFT OPENING is a macramé public gloryhole for intimate exchanges, whispered conversations and queer poetry readings.

A hole

Just a hole

Fucking in public because we can. Fucking in public because we need to. Open. Open up. A hole in the universe, a universal hole. Just a hole. Pour yourself in. Slurp it all down, don’t miss one drop.