To make you feel this way

When Christian Thompson was eleven years old, he finished in first place in a breaststroke heat at his primary school swimming carnival. Post-race, breathless and dripping, he watched confused as event officials distributed cards to three other competitors indicating their respective first, second and third place. Finally, a little yellow peg was placed into his hand, signifying disqualification on a point relating to one fleeting movement of his foot. Thompson disputes the validity of the disqualification to this day. And fragments of the event, his sheer physical depletion, the intensity of his brother's poolside cheering, the elation of finishing first and the bitterness that accompanies a victory 'robbed', come to him with unmitigated clarity. Thompson, an interdisciplinary artist of Bidjara (from the Kunja nation of central west Queensland) and European heritage, often acts as the subject of his own work. He poses in meticulously constructed portraits that play with the tensions within gender and cultural categories; between past and present, feminine and masculine, real and imagined, loss and regeneration. The haunted figure of To make you feel this way (2012) is impossible to categorise. He is placeless, pictured against a pink but featureless background. Poised like a classical Greek sculpture, and wearing 1950s costume swimming cap and clashing hot pink lipstick, he cannot be circumscribed by era. He is androgynous. A slew of medals is pushed to one side of his neck, and his blacked-out eyes, as if observing the flag from a dais, gaze upward in a confounding blend of stoicism and regret, bitterness and pride. Thompson, like many regular swimmers, uses the vast and isolating space offered in water for meditative, constructive thought. The head of the swimmer that he role-plays in To make you feel this way (2012) has been engraved into a series of gold medals in an accompanying work. Here the swimmer is symbolic of the stubborn wound that loss can inflict.