Ill/Fitting- Guen Montgomery

Artist Statement:

 Ill/Fitting centers touch through printed objects, images, and hand-built sculptures. The ceramic drag wigs and textile collagraphs - pieces made from found family textiles relief printed - are a way of talking about high-femme queerness as it butts against the archetypical cis woman.

I am attracted to the collagraph print process and ceramic hand-building because of the emphasis on tactility, texture, and the evidentiary mark. The prints depend on the collagraph process to center both the actual, literal, pressured touch of inked fur or fabric matrix to paper, and the sense of longing to touch that comes from the printed intricate illusion texture. I relate to texture and touch as a key anchor back into our bodies and the physical world.

The collagraph of a discarded familial garment functions both as an incomplete memorial and as memento mori, a reminder that we can’t yet escape the limited materiality of being an animal despite our regalia and rituals. The Grendel-adjacent, pelt creatures take this further. Instead of acting as pictorial reference, these slinky, musty, furred creatures are objects themselves, printed from cut and sewn pelt pieces, and only tangible when pressed, inky, into the paper.

Pulled from autobiographical experiences with death, lesbian family life and in/fertility, they are misunderstood expressions of bodily tactility and the affective experience of discovering that, despite the distractions, one is still an animal.