Unspoken sacrifice
Pyrolised apples, cloth, burnt wooden bowl and altar
Installation: 80 cm x 118 cm x 50 cm
Artist’s Statement
Unspoken Sacrifice intimately exposes the invisible demands placed upon queer individuals within religious traditions. These demands often involve the sacrifice of natural desires. The work takes the form of a sculptural still life, with pyrolysed apples gathered into a burnt wooden bowl and placed on a cloth-covered altar. Together, these elements echo an intimate space to reflect on the cost of these demands.
The burnt wooden bowl serves as a vessel of offering, shaped by fire and scarred by transformation. It holds many of the sacrificed apples, but not all. Some have spilt out and rest on the altar, suggesting a burden too large to contain. This sense of excess mirrors the lived reality of many queer individuals. The apples, which reference the forbidden fruit from the Garden of Eden, are transformed, stripped and sacrificed through the process of pyrolysis. Their form is altered but still recognisable and somewhat beautiful, reflecting how these ‘unnatural queer desires’ cannot be erased.
The cloth beneath the bowl recalls liturgical spaces and sacred rituals. It frames the offering, turning the sculptural arrangement into a site of quiet reverence. The altar does not demand spectacle. It bears witness to what is silently but also involuntarily expected, what is withheld, and what cannot be contained.
Unspoken Sacrifice speaks to the cost of spiritual belonging when it is tied to erasure. It invites the viewer to consider the weight of what is sacrificed and offered and the quiet strength of those who continue to carry it.
Gallery
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