Cynan-Juniper Orton BA (Hons) Fine Art
My art exists as a response to the alienation of having been born and raised under late stage capitalism. It draws on my personal anxieties that arise from being both queer and neurodivergent to begin to understand wider injustices. It is my hope that by expressing anxieties born of cruel systems I can build empathy between myself and others those systems isolate. It is an attempt to let people in pain know that they are not alone in their discomfort.
This does not mean that my work exists as a kind of awareness campaign against loneliness, anxiety, or depression. We are all already aware of our sickness. We feel it deeply, even in our most intimate moments. Creating artwork to remind people of it is largely unnecessary so instead I work through that pain in fiction, confronting it through something fantastical. Then, by overcoming it in the safer space of fiction, the audience can achieve some small amount of catharsis.
In the short term this process allows us to live and maybe even come to terms with our anxieties. In the long term though the study of lies, falsehoods, and alternative worlds has the potential to destabilise those ideas we had originally considered to be true. That perhaps the truths that cause our pain are less immutable than we thought.
This is why my practise holds the study of artwork in the same regard as art itself. If fiction is a tool for surviving our fractured present, then analysing it is how we can begin to imagine a different future.
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Screenshots in this showcase are drawn from interactive fiction works freely avaiable online. Click on the website links below or the "Run Program" screenshot to play the full works.
