Scruffy Lesbian Art Manifesto

In 2025 schreven de kunstenaars Clem Edwards, Angelica Falkeling en Natalia (Nika) Sorzano tijdens een etentje het manifest Scruffy Lesbian Art, waarin ze hun eigen manier van werken en die van bevriende kunstenaars proberen te vatten. In samenwerking met gastcurator Maia Kenney vormt dit manifest de aanleiding voor de nieuwe tentoonstelling Scruffy Lesbian Art and Likeminded Spirits bij Nest. Hierin wordt scruffy onderzocht als manier van werken waarin ruimte is voor het rommelige, het onafgewerkte en het handgemaakte. Hieronder kun je het manifest lezen.

'We don’t need to dominate the material, we don’t need to dominate shit,’ says Natalia (Nika) Sorzano over dinner with Angelica Falkeling and Clem Edwards.

We are discussing how to articulate the aesthetics we call Scruffy Lesbian Art.

We know that Scruffy Lesbian Art may appear unfinished, partially broken, shredded, messy, dirty, slanted, stained, rusty or off-kilter. Straight lines, sharp angles and symmetry are absent and wobbly lines, 85 degree corners and asymmetry reign supreme.

Scruffy Lesbian Art is a way of working with the material world in one’s art-making that recognises bodies, economies and hands in motion and how these are joined together in collages, performances, installations and sculptures. It thrives on imperfection, not for its own sake but because it is handmade. Taking time with a work yields texture – life has a way of getting in – and that is of high importance to the maker.

Scruff artists tell stories spatially. Combining the autobiographical and fictional, they build universes and scenarios. Soldering and sticky tape are both legitimate options. The scruff artist draws stick lines on the large stick to emphasise its stick-ness, they glue the dead fly from the studio to the found plastic comb because it looks pretty, and they spend 8 months recreating a photo of their friends as a massive tapestry just because it was a fun night out.

Alongside DIY solutions and everyday materials, scruffy lesbian art enacts humour and joy that is highly pleasurable for an audience to experience but is sometimes misread as just for fun. Playfulness is a strategy scruffy lesbian artists use as an invitation to talk business.

Scruffy lesbian artists are against mastery and domination. They make excellent researchers, and are highly knowledgeable on the ethics of material practice and the geographies that their materials have travelled. They don’t deny their willingness to buy an art material, nor do they gloss over the contradictions of that willingness in order to be assimilated into the market. Political purity is a conceit, and they know it.

Desire, a gravitational pull or drive, brings these artists into contact with the fragilities and strengths of their materials – and with life – highlighting the materials’ influence over bodies, movement and space. Just as the material expresses its desired or naturalised form, it is conversely shaped by the impressions of bodies, spaces and, ultimately, other matter.

Contrasting materials are brought together, cement on textile, for instance. Less obviously, dog hair becomes a painting’s frame and door knobs dangle with acrylic nails. Like queerness, such formal and textual patchworking pulls from different aesthetic meanings and associations to create non-normative connections. These connections subvert received ideas of gender, sexuality and desire.

Scruffy Lesbian Art embraces the abject and the irrelevant. Dusty corners of a room and cigarette butts from the streets are delighted in. Old works and ideas are re-ignited to take new lives, (dis)identities and representations. And Scruffy Lesbian Art welcomes the audience to performatively use their body – to kneel down or crane upwards, to touch, crouch and zoom in to establish new connections between the works and our senses.

Scruffy Lesbian Art is an invitation to come in closer and appreciate what nourishes us. Since grief, joy, pain and love are all part of life – and so is art.