Reilly Knowles

Artist biography

Reilly Knowles splits his time between Milton and London, ON, and sometimes forgets which town he's in when he wakes up at odd times in the night. He has a good eye for fossil-hunting, and always has paint under his fingernails. He likes making tea from wild plants, but hasn't managed to poison himself yet. Most of all, Reilly loves puzzling through shapes and colours and packs of thick, cold press paper.

Growing up wedged between a farmer’s field and a suburb, I’ve always wondered where exactly nature lies. At precisely what distance from the hydro poles does nature begin? Is it someplace between the gaps in the garbage bags?

Nature seemed like something worth looking for, because it’s the golden standard against which undesirable things are compared. To be natural is to have a good body. A body “as it should be.” To be unnatural is to be overdeveloped, or underdeveloped. To be too masculine, or too feminine. Improperly sexual, or not sexual enough. In this pervasive ideology, the concept of nature is conflated with normalness, cleanliness and beauty, with moral rightness. It’s truncated, tidied up, and weaponised against bodies that are inconvenient to the social order, making them into monsters. But nature doesn’t simply consist of the bodies we arbitrarily value. Nature is messy, and encompasses all the bodies that are neither here nor there, the bodies that could never really sit neatly inside human categories. Monsters are natural. Nature is monstrous.

My practice considers my body’s relationship with nature using a language of feminism, folklore and religious icons. Drawing particularly from ancient Irish art and an eco-centric ethos, I paint, stitch and construct artworks which celebrate living entities that society has sought to tame into exploitable classifications, including the land itself. My work visualises the liberation of monsters living somewhere between life and death, male and female, and human and nonhuman – the liminal, creative gap between dualities. It both reckons with and revels in the Otherness imposed on female, queer, and transgender bodies. It envisions a radical enfolding of these bodies into an understanding of nature, with care towards women, queers, and the environment as crucial components of working towards a healthier social and physical ecosystem.

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