Artist’s Statement: The Boy at the Window shares one of my earliest memories growing up as a teenager where I share a personal experience of looking up at a window and seeing a boy looking out. The ambiguity of the gaze of the boy (who in actual fact was around 17/18 years old) fires my imagination: Is his gaze at me one of desire or something else …? As the poem unfolds, I wonder if I have met that same boy now in later life. The Boy at the Window is one of many examples of my practice which has broadly explored vision, visuality, and the politics of seeing and not seeing since 2000. As both the writer, director and performer within the experimental films and poetry performances I create, I view my practice as performing an auto-ethnography: using these media forms and the chosen themes within their narratives to help me self-reflect and (better) understand myself in relation to acts of looking, seeing and being seen and the difficulty in terms of not seeing/not being seen and my own subjectivity and experiences as British, working class, male, and gay. Themes of masculinity and desire underpin many aspects of my work.
