For the second time this year, Beasties, an exhibition by Deep Sea Astronauts, was showcased at the Bearded Tit. Alongside a stunning opening night performance, video works were shown on screens throughout the venue, customised soundscapes were played in the bathrooms, and heads from the Beasties adorned the hunting-lodge walls of the space for three weeks. To discuss the exhibition further, I sat down with Deep Sea Productions director and Beasties curator Alli Wolf in their studio.
Calum: To start off with, could you explain the overarching curatorial vision for the Beasties exhibition?
Alli: I think at the core of Beasties was the desire to use up all of the little scraps and treasures that I have, as you can see, collected. I’m not very good at throwing things away and there’s only so much that can get used in workshops and stuff, so I end up with all of these little bits of precious things or I find them on the road. It’s just so heartbreaking to have things that are still really usable thrown away and I end up hoarding — you can see behind you — bags and bags of scrappy bits of coloured fabric.
So I wanted to create something that enabled the use of all of those pieces.Also it was this idea that if you leave all of this stuff here just scrunched together and it’s got all these scraps of life from other projects then maybe that just congeals by itself and turns into a creature when you’re not looking. And coming from that idea of this object with soul and life being able to turn into monsters and another element was the amount of waste and glitz and sparkle and very un-environmentally friendly things that are part of the drag world and the queer party scene and everything.
I’m a drag king and it’s wonderful but the amount of wigs that get and this and this and this… I’m there at the end of parties when they’re throwing the streamers out and I’m like, no, no, we can maybe use those. So part of things in my drag act, like any confetti I use in my drag act is from maybe six Mardi Gras ago at a Metro party and I just scooped it up off the floor and I’m like, this is still good.
That also aligned really nicely with this idea of the roots of queer performance culture being very much this DIY, renegade, before the Shein and the Temu and all of that shit then. It was like, you handcraft your costume from whatever is available to you, from what you can beg, borrow and steal. And if you’re making it sparkle with bits of chip packets then you make it sparkle with bits of chip packets. IIn this time where [the queer community] is getting more polarised, there can be a lot of alignment seen between all of the discards of our general capitalist hellscape culture and also the discarding of these incredibly beautiful people and the resilience and the value that is in both can come together in a beautiful way.
C: What prompted the decision to focus on monsters, not just using scraps, but changing the form of the physical performers on stage?
A: I think a lot of it came from those elements of vilification and going through the plebiscite and having people in a culture and community where you thought you were kind of safe suddenly saying that actually, no, you are a monster. This extreme othering of queer people.
The other element is ‘cause it’s fun. I mean, there are a bajillion suits in the world, but it’s always a delight when you can have that full transformative quality of the creatures. A lot of the stuff that I make for Deep Sea Astronauts are for roving and for being out at events and parties and festivals, but all the performers have their faces exposed so that there’s visibility and safety when moving through crowds. The intention of the beasties was we could just go really hard in the transformation and some of those costumes you can barely see out of.
C: What was the process of working with these performers and creating the costumes?
A: We had four core artists, and [for] each of them we would have a meeting beforehand, and in some cases, quite a number of meetings.
One of them even made me a beautiful mood board and sent me PDFs of all of their inspiration. In that meeting, we talked about what they wanted their creature to be and how. So I would be looking into their different inspirations themselves and using that performer as the muse for each costume. Some of the performers really strongly drew on their culture, on traditional styles of dancing, on traditional mythology, and some of them were drawing more on elements of the natural world that they really connected with.
Pretty much all of them had some natural world elements as part of their inspiration, but some had totem animals that were very significant in their culture, and others had core childhood memories of lying on the bottom of the ocean looking up at the sun’s rays, and how do we represent that?
C: How much of the design process was following the overarching ‘Beasties’ concept and how much was it sitting down with the designer and creating a unique piece to them?
A: It was very individualised, each one. We knew where we were coming from in terms of the overall theme of the project. But then everything from what colours, what materials, what stuff was all determined by those conversations with the performer. And then also necessity [played a big factor] in it. I would pull out 17 different bits of fabric for each [costume] and then [go], well, actually, the only piece that’s big enough is this piece. So now this changes what colours are happening, because it’s all built from scraps. And sometimes the scraps were like, barely enough to cover, or not enough to cover.
Like the horns on Yolanda, I made with the sequins I bought when I was in Colombia performing at a queer club over there to make this anaconda-like monster. And I had enough scraps that if I placed them in a certain way, I could cover two thirds of the horns, and then had to cover the other third with something else. And suddenly you’re going ‘Oh no, that was intentional actually’.
C: What was the importance of showcasing a work like this in the Bearded Tit?
A: Part of wanting it at the Bearded Tit was because it is such a strong, powerful, queer haven. Joy is particularly careful about keeping it a really safe and intersectional space to the point where that awareness, like, reaches out into every element and you can feel it. It’s a space that I and a lot of the performers have performed in at many times. I think this would be my third or fourth exhibition there over many years. So it was about that precious space.
And having the intimacy of being in a tiny space did unfortunately mean that it was packed out and we had a lot of people who couldn’t get in because they hit capacity, which was a shame. But it also made it very precious because then the people who were there were the people who were there. And you’re all shoulder to shoulder to see something that’s quite a beautiful offering.
The two performance nights were, you know, jewels in the crown. But the fact that the Beasties almost seamlessly fit into the aesthetic. You can have the Hunting Lodge wall in the salon of all the heads hanging up. You walk into the bathroom and you’re surrounded by the sound that our sound designer Sam Chang has made. And then you have the, like, the video up at Taxidermy TV. It all feels very seamlessly interwoven into that environment.
Beasties played at the Bearded Tit 12-28 March 2025.
