#QueeringLockdown The Beauty of the Discarded: recycling and queerness in Daniel Fountain’s work

FF: Both your works ‘Cocoon‘ (2020) and ‘Nest‘ (2019), entirely made from discarded textiles and found-waste objects, seem so relevant to meditate on queerness and community in these porous, uncertain, and fluid times of COVID-19 pandemic . Can you elaborate more on the meaning and making process behind them?

DF: ‘Nest‘ (2019) started as a small project, and grew while collecting the materials I have found. The piece is made from found and discarded materials interwoven, such as stained textiles with holes, plastic packaging, feathers, electrical wire, waste threads. Given that queer citizens often feel cast aside or ‘refused’ in society, it felt fitting to construct my own nest using materials that have been discarded, tainted, unloved and marginalised. The aim here was to give agency to these shunned objects, celebrate queer identity, inviting people to engage with the piece, sit in it, and contemplate.

‘Cocoon‘ (2020) is a re-working of ‘Nest‘ and spotlights the crucial role of the making process and how the materials are always reused and recycled back into the practice again. The work explores ideas of domesticity and home, demonstrating how for queer lives these notions are continuosly contested, in states of flux, and ever-changing.

Presented in its evolved form, the work, made from discarded textiles, latex, acrylic medium, represents a corpse-cum-cocoon structure, which oozes, sheds and drips abject substances. The twine, sourced from a local fishing lake, is done in bondage knots, and I used it as a nod to the Japanese decorative art of Shibari and to sexual (queer) subcultures.

FF: You were selected as one of the artists for And What? Queer Arts Fest 2020 with your piece ‘Faggots‘ (exhibition closed prematurely for pandemics). Can you tell us about your findings about the etymology of the word, which has later been referred to gay people in a pejorative sense?

The project ‘Faggots‘ started with a research on the roots of the world faggot- primarily a bundle of sticks, and twigs used to burn heretics and people regarded as others at the stake. This series of work explores this process using found objects including poles, rope, and gloves. The specific method of binding follows the Shibari bondage tradition, offering reference to (queer) sexual culture.

Additionally, in needlework faggoting (or fagoting) refers to a method of joining two pieces of fabric together leaving a small gap or ditch between them with a zig-zag pattern. Within this series the process of faggoting has been used to unite scraps of waste fabric and the stitch itself has been intentionally exaggerated. Sections have also been adorned with bits of broken jewellery which provoke associations with the human body, adornment and excess.