Peripheral Review

"Despite what much of the writing on the subject would suggest, the value of thinking about or looking at slime—as art material, as life force, as fetish, as soother, as body, as indulgence, or as threat to the status quo—is not that it shows us how we can work past the limits of our sensitive human bodies, but rather, that it reminds us we have the potential to transform into something that need not suffer for basic human rights. Slime, like all of us, relaxes into new forms, adapts, slips from fingers, and continues on with what it has picked up along the way." - @laurenprousky

Writer, artist, and curator Lauren Prousky shares a DIY recipe on slime and mulls over some sensory experiences in this eclectic field guide. Observing elements of it in the works of Tyler Matheson, Pinar Marul, and jacqueline Beaumont, she invites us to sink into themes such as bodily autonomy, metamorphosis, oppressive binaries, unregulated expansions, and the #oddlysatisfying nature of the nature.

jacqueline Beaumont also uses the gooey process of mold-making in her work, Penile Inversion Vaginoplasty (2022) which consists of a block of biopolymer waste and a cast of the artist’s phallus, as a way to critique the commonly held beliefs that threaten trans livelihood. Beaumont’s “psychosexual pit trap” acts simultaneously as a phallus fossil that subverts a traditional cis-het male desire to immortalize his presumed greatness, and an active womb nurturing a growing colony of bacteria. In her own words: “By casting a part of myself to be inherited by microbial bodies, the void left behind, becomes a receptacle for the world around it, accumulating societies’ preconceived notions of sex, gender, value, and time, within a soft architecture of decay.”9