Fairy: An Exhibition as a Site of Queer Pedagogy

Submitted for Critical Speculations on Art School Education – Glasgow School of Art. This paper discusses Fairy, an exhibition, public program and learning space exploring ‘fairies’ and queer presences. Sited in a Victorian-era public garden in Melbourne, Australia, and facing an historic artwork known as the ‘fairies tree,’ Fairy was an exhibition and an evolving pedagogical site, hosting workshops, talks and forums. The activity was both embedded in university art and design courses and open to the general public. The projects and workshops looked at art historical examples of fairies by queer artists, re-created structures from the ‘Radical faeries commune’ in NSW, and engaged foundation year art students with fairy collage workshops that sought to develop queer methodologies through the politics of the students’ respective subjectivities. Across the month, events would bring together queer elders, activists, academics, artists and poets with art students. Using Eve Kososfy Sedgwick and Jack Halberstam, the paper will situate Fairy through a reparative reading framework and notions of queer temporality, engaging ‘fairies’ across various historical vectors and cross-generational constitutions that made up the participants. The paper will explore the implications of perpetually unstable definitions of queerness by traversing the tensions inherent in the fairy as a cipher, balancing the specificity of queer experiences and histories with the slippery, ephemeral nature of the fairy itself. As a queer led space, Fairy was an experiment that questioned what the critical value of the queer creative method might be. Within a pedagogical space across a broad demographic, Fairy played out material and intangible ways queers circulate, contest and collect together.