Flo McGarrell

Gonads, 2005

I had the idea to fill the courtyard with gonad forms partly because I had just executed a large "golden egg" shape for my parents 50th anniversary, and I liked the results of that pattern so much I wanted to re-use it, and then I had the idea of making pairs; as a result of the curators suggestion of body as a starting point for a show, I chose to focus on what is about to happen to my own body as I start taking testosterone to become a more male like person. I’m discovering how much our bodies and minds are controlled by hormones specific to the gonads we were born with, and how currently we are able to change the hormonal make up of our bodies, through HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) and thus alter the body and mentality we were born with. I see the Gonads as generic, being neither male nor female. Eventually I would like to make more gonad pairs of different colors and materials with different characters, sagging, dragging, floating, flying, bouncing and in limbo in order to illustrate variation in the spectrum beyond the binary ideation of "woman glands up - man glands down".  In this piece I want one Gonad up in the air hovering, and inside the other I will have my first shot of Testosterone administered to me by a friend who is himself in a state of ambiguity and change already.