Working across acrylic painting, illustration, and autotheoretical writing, my work explores the self in relation to madness, gender, and kinship using personal/family histories and affects to know the self beyond the body and in relationship to others. Interested in how family histories and trauma become encoded in memory, affect, and the body, my work explores the relationship between self, kinship, and feeling by taking up the affective pull of places, objects, and cultural iconography. What memories do objects carry? What life do feelings have outside the body? Drawing on my training in biology and neuroscience, clowns, and childhood memories, my recent work explores what Sara Ahmed (2014) describes as the affective excess of queerness through experimental memoir style autotheoretical writing and the creation of “feeling bodies,” abstracted forms that visualize feelings beyond the body. Building on this body of work, in this project inner emotions and bodily sensations are externalized and abstracted, to create a taxonomy of feeling that re-presents queer feelings, grief, loss, and fear as (dis)embodied forms.

When I made the decision to euthanize my childhood cat and move across the country during a global pandemic to research queer community I believed in the transformative potential of queer relationships. Uprooted from my community and queer chosen kin, I was met with the complicated affects of hope and grief, a queer excess of feeling that resisted easy description. To articulate my embodied experience of moving through this queer loss, I began a series of abstract illustrations and paintings created during the start of my MA that re-presented affects such as grief, fear, and loss as “feeling bodies,” visual forms that depict affects beyond the body. Borrowing imagery from cellular biology and taxonomical style illustrations, my “feeling bodies” play with affects as forms, shapes, textures, and colours. Experimenting with the layering of paint and varying shape as affects, and mirroring the fluidity of queer bodies, and queer self-representation/re-presentation, this project asks what it means to re-imagine ourselves, and re-imagine queerness, as a series of “feeling bodies,” in a relational and affective world. Dividing, multiplying, reproducing, like the “feeling bodies” queerness is in a state of becoming – like cells multiplying the boundaries of gender, sexuality, and self are permeable, tactile, responsive.

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After graduating from the University of Lethbridge, Alberta with a Degree in Neuroscience and Minor in Studio Art in Spring 2020, Lauren “Elle” Morris (they/them) moved to Toronto, Ontario conduct collaborative and art-based research on care working with 2SLGBTQIA+ and Mad/Disabled communities. Graduating from their MA in Communication and Culture in Fall 2024, they are working on self- publishing a collaborative zine created with participants from their research, Tender, which imagines care from a community-based, abolitionist, and interdependent perspective. Their recent solo projects explore memory, affect, and relationality through meditations on kinship and emotion. Their work has been exhibited at Casa (2020) in Lethbridge, Alberta. More about Lauren’s work can be seen at @ellemorris.art and linkedin.com/in/lauren-s-morris/.