Hysterical Exhibition by Bee Illustrates and Eliza Hatch
Maedbh Pierce interviews photographer Eliza Hatch and artist Bee Illustrates on their exhibition Hysterical which celebrates the women and non-binary people using art as a tool to create lasting change.
A brainchild in its third solar spin, Hysterical, an annual charity art exhibition and cultural programme taking place each Women's History Month, came about due to a serendipitous encounter when Bee Illustrates (they/them) attended a sustainable fashion event at which Eliza Hatch (she/her) was a panellist. Less than a year later, recognising the synchronicity of their values and ambitions, Hysterical - striving to provide artists with a break into the industry, a networking outlet and a community of like-minded creatives, came to be.
Bathroom details
Reflecting on Hysterical as a venture distinct from the elitism prevalent in the art scene, Bee notes, “We wanted to make a space where people can come and enjoy art, and you don't have to be a professional artist or know all of the things.” Eliza adds, “It’s somewhere to come and have a look, to have a nice time and maybe make friends like we did.” Hysterical, as a showcase of underrepresented and marginalised artists, constitutes a culmination of their respective creative visions, from Eliza’s work on Cheer Up Luv, a project amalgamating photography with journalism, activism and social media, raising awareness of street harassment across the globe to Bee's queer, mental health-conscious illustrations and activism.
Besprinkling breadcrumbs that had us in hysterics, Bee and Eliza schemed, this year, a full-scale, interactive, collaborative installation - querying perhaps the most beloved motif/scapegoat/breeding ground of transphobes - the loo. Amid eBay-hauled laundry lines peppered with polaroids and blue and pink undies, pastel-hued sanitary products, a baby blue toilet complete with a bidet, teal polaroid cameras, and a reification of Darren Aronofsky’s mirror symbolism (though it has for some years been the dominion of gender non-denominational girlhood bloggers teetering the hyperreal and the satirical) VACANT/ENGAGED suggests that, while gendered marginalisation cannot guarantee your safety, it ensures the exclusion and marginalisation of another.
Bee and Eliza in VACANT/ENGAGED
For Bee, VACANT/ENGAGED revisits an old project of theirs, which they had made before coming out, “It was a project I did when I was like seventeen, a very low-brow, crappy version of this very badly. At the time, I was very deep in the closet and denial, and I have always wanted to redo it.” Speaking on the full-scale installation, Bee and Eliza note, “We wanted to encourage people to take part in the art and be part of the art.” Continuing, Bee adds, “There’s a certain irony in the fact that it is such a contested topic, despite the majority of us sharing a gender-neutral bathroom in our homes. VACANT/ENGAGED suggests that, perhaps, it is not the loo which requires re-examining but the narratives, institutions and norms that enable us of marginalised gender, particularly the trans community, to live in constant, dissociating fear that any trip to the bathroom, walk in the park, or pop to the shops could constitute one’s final frames (-- girlhood.)
Perambulating the launch, Eliza and Bee - alchemised from curators and constructionists (they created VACANT/ENGAGED in the forty-eight hours preceding the private launch) to Gatsby-esque hosts, by and large, approached conversations dyadically, tidal to one another nightlong. Creations such as Alexandra McKinney’s (she/her) transgressively hypervisible Feeling Freely poster collection and mini workshop space to Fill Me In, a smokescreen of sculptural razzle by Milly Aburrow (she/her), though vastly different in lived experiences and creative approaches, stood united in their subversion, their collective metamorphoses of wounds into an opportunity for synergic interrogation, reframing and healing. Participating artists who had, in October 2023, responded to a callout with the theme of radical creativity and vocalised divergent hopes for what their works might evoke in an audience.
Mirror affirmations
While Stuck in a Loop creator Jasmine Foo (she/her), through her synthesis of crochet, film and technologisation, expresses that, when processing complex emotion, linguistic capture stands a singular, sometimes inferior cognitive mode. For Oumou Aidara (they/them), they hoped that members of the global minority, in engaging with their film Feel The Ground - a Berlin-shot docufiction exploring Germany-based and Senegalese perspectives - might realise the distinction between ethical consumption of vintage clothing and gentrification, that to shop second-hand, incessantly and uncritically, sometimes, may take the only warm coat a low-income individual can afford, off the racks. Hysterical's abundant capacity for contention and disdain for glass ceilings and fourth walls does not cease at Bermondsey but tarries via a host of tactile, stim-friendly, occasionally quasi-sporty (the queers are at the skatepark, sketching and boozing) events, with all profits from ticket purchases and artwork sales supporting Galop, the UK’s leading LGBTQ+ anti-abuse charity.
With the progression of the evening came impromptu Polaroid photo shoots, astrological diagnoses and much consensual, mutual trauma dumping. There were sneaky, sweet drink-induced cig-bumming endeavours, friends gazing at each other with One Day-esque softness that could be platonic, romantic or most likely – everything, all at once, all the time and, as it gradually occurred to Bee and Eliza, that they had not only accomplished but exceeded, their pledge to their community, the space between their shoulders and ears, inch by inch, reconveyed.
Emmally Parson (she/they) (Craft is the Future, Hysterical 2023), rushing from work, showed the gadje how it is done - serving bouquet-bolstered office siren, their partner’s visible, lasting joy for them manifested in a trundling of backpacks like a privilege. And, amid confessions of masked fragility with Alexandra McKinney and the standard query of if it was the bartender or their inherent unavailability, which was so unreasonably attractive, there germinated not only the realisation that Bee and Eliza had, undeniably, mastered the sauce of the mass queer meet-cute, but also, that, amid our respective experiences of disenfranchised emotion and experience, in moving with compassion for ourselves and others and unrelentingly embodying all the things a misogynistic culture deems weak, strange or indulgent, the queer kids - once voiceless and repressed - had carbonised, transmuting to become the adults we once needed and the representation we once lacked.
Note: Thank you also to participants Fiona Quadri (she/her) (Hysterical, 2023), Salt and Sister Studio (Hysterical, 2023), Maggie Williams (she/her) (Hysterical, 2023) and Molly Piper Greaves (she/her) (Hysterical, 2022) for your insights which facilitated the writing of this article.
Hysterical: Radical Creativity is featured at the Bermondsey Project Space until the 31st March.