Pillow Talk is a creature that integrates capacitive touch sensors in two highly tactile crafts: textile and ceramic. This creature is full of language: when each piece of metal in its hands and chest is touched, it speaks to you with the words of queer and trans theorists and writers. Laying on its chest and touching it, you hear more personal, emotional stories and secrets.
Shot from above of someone cuddling with the creature on its twin platform bed.
Close-up of a hand delicately touching the metal wires embedded in a ceramic hand. In the background are the deep blue torso and cobalt blue velvet tail of the creature.
Touching the wires embedded in the fingers of the left hand.
Touching the metal beads (milagros) sewn to the chest.
“[A queer] culture is developing in which intimate relations and the sexual body can in fact be understood as projects for transformation among strangers.”
— Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 2002
Sex is deeply relational, as is gender. (For example: “daddy.”) As such, sex can be a powerful technology for shaping gender, acting directly on and referring directly to the body in one’s preferred and desired terms and ways. Simultaneously, sex and gender inform queer culture, which tangles with dominant culture at large, exposing and eradicating what’s shameful or perverse in a clash over public and private. Pillow Talk attempts to express the effects and affects of those transformative, intimate encounters among strangers, showing how queer and trans people co-create their identities and worlds.
Close-up of the creature's grey- and black-glazed face.
Its face is a ceramic cast of mine, leaning into the act of self-construction and serving as a strange avatar. It’s half-snake, phallic yet cuddly, leaning into monstrousness—the reclaimed, constructed, portentous transsexual creature of Susan Stryker’s “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” and the burdensome monster of Barthes as abject lover in A Lover’s Discourse, who erases the beloved’s subjectivity by overwhelming with its speech, and becomes “one huge tongue.”
Gabriel laying on the creature, with its blue velvet tail draped over them.
For about 2 years before DT, my primary art practice was ceramics. I mostly made things like the sculpture on the right: complex pieces with a lot of sticky-out bits that made them very fragile to handle. On the other end of the spectrum are the ceramics we touch and use daily without thinking about it: mugs, bowls, toilets, sinks; sturdy and entirely utilitarian.
I became interested in making ceramics that were functional but magical; throughout DT I’ve been incorporating physical computing in sculptures to create magical-feeling interactions and encounters without a screen.