Todd Fuller

Artist statement

Don’t forget to remember is an ongoing research project bringing together performance and drawing to consider a history of violence against gay and transgender people at Australian beats. I visit sites of historic and recent violence, collect soil and turn it into pigment. The resulting bruised paper is used to document the ubiquitous infrastructure and meeting places found there. In the performance, I draw a park bench on a gallery wall before attempting to sit on it. My body becomes an eraser as I try to sit on a bench where a partner will never meet me, while the audience becomes complicit in a series of increasingly violent gestures. Together, the works form an ode and a eulogy to lives lost: a quiet act of witness and remembering that asks us to look back, consider what remains, and carry these histories forward.