After Tsarouchis - Military Police arresting Eros. Briony Galligan and Mel Deerson. 2022.

Image description: A multicoloured, energetic pencil drawing of two figures; one is a naked fairy and one is a military policeman. The policeman ties the fairy’s hands behind their back with string while the fairy turns away; around them a swirling atmosphere, buried under the policeman’s feet a skull and some bones. The drawing is a loose copy of an artwork of the same name by queer Modernist artist Yannis Tsarouchis.

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mel deerson and spiros panigirakis (EDs.)
fairy: an experiment in queer art pedagogy

Softcover, 210 x 297 mm, 160pp, laser print
First edition of 100
Design by Jacob Pham
Published by 3-ply, 2024
ISBN 978-0-9873555-4-6
RRP AUD 28.00

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Created by Mel Deerson and Spiros Panigirakis, two Naarm-based artists who are also university fine art teachers, fairy is a creative and pedagogical experiment, where the politics of queer visibility, queer histories and communities are played out through the slippery figure of the fairy. fairy is envisioned as an old-fashioned ‘reader’ - a DIY collection of photocopied educational material, designed to be shareable, cheap and useful. Blurring the line between institutional and community knowledge, and between spaces of learning and spaces of display, the publication gathers material from exhibitions, events, workshops and texts that respond to the double meaning of ‘fairy’ as an ephemeral spirit and a semi-derogatory term for a gay man. 

fairy includes: an essay by Mel Deerson & Spiros Panigirakis; research into queer and fairy-ish Australian art histories by Melissa Ratliff, Jeremy Eaton and Mathew Jones; a text ‘Hidden beings’ by Manisha Anjali that emerged from a fairy poetry workshop; teaching materials from a ‘Radical queer architectures’ university subject taught by Luca Lana; and documentation of classes, artworks and public events, including a fairy collage workshop by Peter Waples-Crowe, a performance by Ari Angkasa, and paintings, drawings, and sculptural installations by Martin Boyd, Mel Deerson and Briony Galligan, Jeremy Eaton, Mathew Jones, Danni McGrath, and Spiros Panigirakis.

fairy: an experiment in queer art pedagogy will be launched through a series of events.

  • The first launch celebration will be at Sydenham International, Marrickville, Gadigal-Sydney, Saturday 5 October, 3-5pm. We invite you to an informal discussion about the publication with editors/contributors Spiros Panigirakis, Mel Deerson and Melissa Ratliff. 

  • The second launch celebration will be at the Australian Queer Archives, Pride Centre, St. Kilda, Naarm-Melbourne, Saturday 12 October, 2:30-4pm. We invite you to an informal discussion about the publication with editors/contributors Spiros Panigirakis, Mel Deerson and contributing artists.

  • Co-editor Mel Deerson and contributor Manisha Anjali will present a program Desiring spirits and medieval women's mystic texts at the Same Page book fair at Gertrude Contemporary, Sunday 20 October, 1:30-2:30pm. (Note date and time change from original programming.)

EDITORS NOTES

  • This project emerged from a conversation between the two of us about art and teaching. As queer artists who teach, we were interested in the shadowy position teaching occupies within the art world. There’s all this creative labour involved in it, and many of us do it, but it’s almost never seen as part of art practice. What happens if we weave teaching into the fabric of an exhibition?  In 2023, we were given the opportunity to create a temporary project next to (possibly queer) Modernist artist Ola Cohn’s Fairies’ Tree sculpture in the Fitzroy Gardens in Melbourne, and we thought, of course, a show about fairies, by fairies. Ephemeral, semi-visible and ambiguous, teaching, fairies and queerness seem to have a similar marginal resonance. Two solid weeks of fairy teaching, workshops, lectures and performances within a fairy exhibition led to another iteration at Platform Arts in Geelong, and now, in its shape-shifting way, fairy has unfolded into the form of this book.

  • fairy is a complex project that has been unfolding across the last few years; we wanted to create a publication that focused on its more ephemeral elements (public events, teaching, workshops, and research) beyond simply documenting the exhibition component. All contributions to the reader are from artists, teachers and researchers directly involved in the fairy project. Although primarily Australian-focused, our hope is that the publication can also be used by teachers and researchers further afield, both as a pedagogical resource and as an example of a project which blurs the lines between institutional and community knowledge, between spaces of learning and spaces of display, and between fairies and ‘fairies.’

  • We wanted to enlist a recently graduated student to design the publication. Jacob Pham was recommended to us by a fellow teacher; having looked at his playful, textured work, we knew he was an excellent match for the project. We showed Jacob old university ‘readers’ from the 90s and early 2000s when we were at university as references. Jacob was excited by the heterogenous design languages encompassed in readers and their diy aesthetic, and went to work with a keen enthusiasm and generosity to create this feel for our publication.  He instantly got that this wasn’t about making a publication that looked ‘designed’ so much as collated, and he put immense amounts of work into creating different looks and textures for each section of the reader. We are so grateful to him for running with our vision and putting so much creative energy into the publication; it’s a testament to Jacob’s creativity and openness that fairy looks the way it does.