Dirty Bottom

Dirty Bottom Paul, Lewis, (2015 – 2019). [Output Type: Q Digital or Visual media] Research Cluster: Image [Film/Show/Exhibition] Output Cluster Abstract The output is a short film about gender and embodied practice. This practice research project seeks to investigate how concepts of embodiment might be engaged as a creative strategy in the development and realisation of queer artist filmmaking. Research Process: The aims of the research sets out to investigate how embodiment as a methodology may be utilised in artist practice within filmmaking. The project investigates how embodiment in relation to queer cinema might lead to new aesthetic variations in films that have a queer notion, yet visually remove fictional or documentary dramatic structures and representational queer codes and conventions. The method centred on producing a film that explores the hidden world of the underside of a Series 3 Landrover in the city of London. This unsafe space is reclaimed through the introduction of framing devices such as beauty mirrors to explore the aesthetic complexity of abject concepts. By placing the filmmaker into the frame concepts of embodied space, queer space and gender expectations might be contextually re-evaluated, queering traditionally considered macho spaces. Research Insights: The film generates new insights and contexts around perceptions of queer cinema and theoretical contexts of gender, contributing to the discourse of queer film outside of dramatic narratives and same sex character plot driven cinema. The research frames aesthetic hierarchies between aesthetic values and traditional codes and conventions of queer sexualised viewing within the evolution of gendered notions of an embodied approach. Dissemination: The film has been disseminated in the UK: 25, London Gallery West, London. 12 October – 31 October 2015; RE// Bermondsey Artists’ Group Exhibition, London, 2019. 'Embodied Methodologies’ 2016: The fourth annual Practice-based Research Conference, hosted by Royal Holloway, University of London. 4th to 5th December 2016.