LHB

Charlotte Prodger’s recent 6-month artist residency in Berwick-Upon-Tweed (a small town in Northumberland – 3 miles south of the Scottish border) has marked the beginning of an open-ended period of research into an idea of ‘queer rurality’; how queer lives are lived beyond the densely-populated urban contexts that generally dominate LBGTQI narratives, and what happens to the contingent coded signifiers of queer bodies within wildernesses.Throughout LHB Prodger recounts her fixation – which began during her Berwick residency – with the Pacific Crest Trail; a 6-month, 2,663 mile long hiking path stretching from the border of Mexico to the border of Canada that traverses some of the most uninhabited wilderness in the US. Simultaneously, she repurposes the Northumberland flag – which marks the turbulent and patriarchal history involving territory, borders and identity of England’s most sparsely populated region – as a rectilinear framing device for her footage. Prodger uses this formal template to tessellate a personal camera-phone archive she has accumulated of urinating in various rural landscapes – an intimate queer territoriality outwith the gender-delineated spaces within which bodies are and are not allowed to piss. Fluctuating between the macro of geopolitical land use and the micro of the personal-political body, LHB continues Prodger’s ongoing exploration into the complex relationships between bodies, identity, technology and time.