Liam Benson

Born 1980, Westmead
Bachelor of Arts, Fine Arts
Graduation show: 2003
Graduation ceremony: 2004

Artwork in Space YZ

Bleeding Glitter, 2005
C type print
81 x 104 cm
Collection of Courtney Gibson

Ocha Envy, 2004
Single channel video with sound
11:07 mins
Campbelltown City Council Collection

Tan Lines, 2004
Single channel video with sound
2:31 mins
Campbelltown City Council Collection

Ocha Envy (stills), 2004

Ocha Envy is a performance that embraces, parodies and plays with my fascination, insecurities and desires relating to cultural and gender representation.

As a queer person, I live an experience of ongoing re-evaluation of identity. I embraced and learned to appreciate it early in life, so navigating my relationship with ‘femme’ and ‘masc’ has become a natural part of my internal dialogue.  

In my early twenties I began practicing drag as a way of expanding on my queer cultural experience. I had witnessed drag as a part of the immersive night life of Sydney’s Oxford Street, which was in stark contrast to the place, people and forms of representations that surrounded me at home in western Sydney’s Emu Heights. It took a little longer to realise I could embrace the dialogue between the two environmental influences, and that both were informing who I was, how I performed in and out of drag and that either way I was the same person.

Tan Lines (stills), 2004

Sprawled across a floral couch, illuminated by the glow of the TV, my figure echoed the visual language of the classic reclining nude.

I have always been interested in the historical representations of the nude form. But the bodies I saw in paintings weren’t my body or representative of the men who existed around me. Within the arduous daily routine of the hard-working men I grew up with, was a languid, intimate moment of repose, where they would relax and mould their form to the curves of familiar and reliable family couch. Tan Lines is an ode to the gentle vulnerability I witnessed in these moments. 

I remember turning up to Z block with an old Christmas tree box, full of drawings, ceramics, textile objects and beadwork. It was a disorganised mess, but the artists who welcomed me that day, Julie Rrap and Peter Charuk, respected each item I tentatively removed from that box, like it was a little piece of my soul. I’m not sure anyone actually said the words, but the moment spoke to me clearly, and it said “you belong here”.