“Stuck in the mine” is a project I have been working on the last year, using the imagery of a canary to explore existence as a queer individual in modern day society. The idea for the project stemmed from issues in America recently highlighting how quiet our government is on queer issues, showing a lack of respect for us and the innate homophobia rooted deep within the system. This results in little to no solidarity shown for our community and the injustices we are facing, alongside a concerning rise of anti-LGBTQ thinking in the UK.
The canary itself is due to their common association with the spread of joy, singing beautiful music, serving as a reminder to sing our own song loud, using the full power of our voices to spread our message of joy with others. Naturally, I find this concept to coincide with the power of using your voice to bring awareness to queer issues and spreading queer joy, especially to those who are not able to in their own communities, showing our LGBTQ+ youth the euphoria of embracing yourself unapologetically and living comfortably in your own skin.
The canary is also a play on the common use of canaries in the past to detect carbon monoxide within coal mines. The idea being that by taking this bird with them in a small box, if the gas was present in the air then the bird would be killed before the miners, allowing them to escape before they too succumbed to the same fate. The birds have since become a symbol of early warning and sacrifice which I find reminiscent of the modern-day fearmongering of trans individuals by both the government and right-wing groups, with it being clear that this hatred transfers to all aspects of queer communities, and even cisgendered individuals who don’t conform to society’s expectations of gender. This situation is blatantly dangerous for everyone involved, showing a need to stand in solidarity for any and all injustices, because without trans people, there is no LGBTQ community.
