I view the Luminous Bodies residency at Gibraltar Point on Toronto Island as a crucial opportunity to expand my artistic practice by exploring the intersections of my nonbinary, queer, and disabled identities in a supportive environment. The residency’s focus on the body aligns with my artistic practice: creating experiences and performances through enactments of gestures I interpret as queer. These gestures focus on themes of reversal, reconstruction, and shift. I am also interested in the potential for objects to act as surrogates for intimacy or human touch. I will use this residency to create performance props and body actions to convey the complex realities of these lived experiences.

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Amber Helene Müller St. Thomas is a Canadian artist who lives and works in Toronto. Their artistic practice is based on developing performative actions that include elements of touch and queer gestures. They primarily work in lens-based media, textiles and performance. They are interested in communal interaction, materiality, and the potential for objects to function as symbols of self and surrogates for intimacy. Müller St. Thomas completed their MFA at York University (2017). They were a beneficiary of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Graduate Master’s Scholarship (2016). They participated in the 2018 Hamilton Supercrawl Arts Festival and the 2020 Venice International Performance Art Week. In 2021, they attended the Cleaning the House Workshop by the Marina Abramović Institute in Greece. In 2022, they participated in the NARS Artist Residency in Brooklyn, New York, with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. They completed a residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, supported by the Liz Crockford Artists Fund Award (2023). In 2024, they were an artist in residence at Mass MoCA, and in 2025, they have an upcoming solo show at the NARS Foundation in Brooklyn, New York. More about Amber’s work can be seen at amberhelenemullerstthomas.com.