Felix Beaudry: The Glob Mother

Text by Jillian McManemin

Felix Beaudry’s titular work, The Glob Mother, is a tableau. A 70's looking couch with a decorative woven pattern becomes home for machine-knit busts, reliefs, a reclining figure, and a series of heads in various states of undone. Some of the faces are pinned to the wall, excess fabric like the skin from the neck and back of the scalp is stretched and flayed to mimic a picture plane. Other heads have fabric hanging from them like skin not fully attached to form – a shroud, a flap. Unfinished heads become ideas, aborted figures, identities to take on and off. A reclining figure sits on the couch amongst his brethren. We sit next to this figure, rearrange the heads, and find ourselves on the couch amongst them. The Glob Mother becomes a space to arrange and get comfy. What mother made is subject to chance, to change, the possibility of reordering, of violation, play, and agency. 

This tableau and exhibition title reference the 1953 children’s book, The Glob––where a cute, mucky creature presents the Darwinian stages of evolution. The Glob’s message is sticky. Politics that surround the body and our biological origin story, are based in myth with the aim to control. Becoming globby is a way out, becoming globby is about agency. The Glob weaves myth with the real, blending both forces. The character transforms himself based on curiosity, starting from an amorphous creature, The Glob changes because he yearns to interact with the world—and this speaks to the trans experience. 

How can we have creative control over our bodies? What will the interaction with others be like? To slip on and off the sweaters of various skins. Could skin be a shared dominion? And, what of our role as queer and trans makers? Beaudry messes with the annoyingly rigid lines, creating from a space of desire rather than accepting a given role.  He embraces the stickiness and his process beautifully mirrors transition as a space of desire. 

We cannot read sculpture like we read tapestry. There is touch. Touch is the origin story of sculpture. Sculpture exists in the world, is made from the world, it cannot be divorced from its time. Textiles are particularly difficult to conserve, they touch the body when they are worn. This is expanded on, as The Glob Mother engages touch in a direct way. Via touch, Beaudry puts the idea of form into a flat image, and then that pattern is given volume. There is contact with the body in the real world, then an abstract concept of it which is a space of creativity, and then another body is born, fused with yearning and made possible by technology—a spliced cyborgian figure that the artist has to contend with, the gap between a visual projection and what is actually born from the machine. 

Beaudry’s works engage both the medieval and the brutality of fast fashion, textiles created and discarded. Tapestry presents allegory, and asks to be read like a story or morality tale. Yet, The Glob Mother does away with the virtues attached to finding the authentic self and allows for multiplicity. We are to be built upon. We generate from fantasy, from desire that’s been gently pushed from the machine, the bound flesh made through rows of needles, sutures, and pattern, the colors that slip out holding each other, the skin graphs of sculpture.