as part of my phd research and thesis, This exhibition was held at
the penny school gallery, creative industry centre.
kingston upon thames
on 23 March - 3rd april 2025,
displaying the practice aspect of the research.
Poster Designed by Moon II Sun from original photograph taken by Arnhel de Serra 2025
The wearing of costumes forms part of the research project A Hybrid Nation, which explores how costume can still act as an agent of transformation and encounter when separated from the live body.
The Exhibition answers questions about how hybrid identities can be embodied and shared through presence, material, and multispecies aesthetics. Developed through a neurodivergent-led, practice-based approach, this work invites alternative modes of engagement, especially for those within the live and performative, art-based environments whose experiences fall outside normative neurotypical structures. What emerges here is not data, but liquid knowledge: generated through interaction, presence, and embodied response.
Taking inspiration from Derrida, who challenged the 'norm' of academic structure, where he believed that the arts are in themselves are a form of writing, and that the traditional academic structure does not always lend itself to people who think outside this structure. This exhibition is also a way of challenging the academic structure and through the re-aligning of oneself through practice, this is for me another way of forming and building on a performative framework through the use of costumes, where the body is placed as an observer, yet it is also an active part in writing both the practice and the contextual part of the thesis.
Following in Derrida's footsteps where unlike traditional research methods that rely on detached observation and science based outcomes, A Hybrid Nation draws on existential and embodied experience. Nelson (2013) explains, “Empiricism posits that knowledge of an independent reality is obtained through the objective observation by neutral researchers…” (p.49), I feel my work resists that structure. I am not a neutral observer, my mind and body is hyper active and this practice is not separate from me. I wear the costume, create the space, living with an acute awareness of my hyper sensitivity of what is moving beneath the surface when others encounter it.
The knowledge that emerges is not gathered from clinical observation, but through ethnographic encounters and intimate interactions. Through the wearing of re-imagined hybrid animal costumes, such as the mischievous wolf, the ceremonial lagomorph, the inquisitive alchemist, the tartan hybrid, the leather busting queer cruiser and the overheated rabbit.
In unconventional and performative methods I test how multispecies identities might be embodied. In the exhibition, visitors responded in unexpected ways: some reported feeling seen, unsettled, or invited into a kind of silent dialogue. One neurodivergent student, previously non-verbal in class, spoke afterwards for the first time. These moments are not easy to measure, however I feel they are important. They show that artistic practice can produce meaningful knowledge, felt through the body, shared through space, and lived beyond the moment of performance. (in the thesis you can find more information in relation to the exhibition on page 93)
The Exhibition answers questions about how hybrid identities can be embodied and shared through presence, material, and multispecies aesthetics. Developed through a neurodivergent-led, practice-based approach, this work invites alternative modes of engagement, especially for those within the live and performative, art-based environments whose experiences fall outside normative neurotypical structures. What emerges here is not data, but liquid knowledge: generated through interaction, presence, and embodied response.
Taking inspiration from Derrida, who challenged the 'norm' of academic structure, where he believed that the arts are in themselves are a form of writing, and that the traditional academic structure does not always lend itself to people who think outside this structure. This exhibition is also a way of challenging the academic structure and through the re-aligning of oneself through practice, this is for me another way of forming and building on a performative framework through the use of costumes, where the body is placed as an observer, yet it is also an active part in writing both the practice and the contextual part of the thesis.
Following in Derrida's footsteps where unlike traditional research methods that rely on detached observation and science based outcomes, A Hybrid Nation draws on existential and embodied experience. Nelson (2013) explains, “Empiricism posits that knowledge of an independent reality is obtained through the objective observation by neutral researchers…” (p.49), I feel my work resists that structure. I am not a neutral observer, my mind and body is hyper active and this practice is not separate from me. I wear the costume, create the space, living with an acute awareness of my hyper sensitivity of what is moving beneath the surface when others encounter it.
The knowledge that emerges is not gathered from clinical observation, but through ethnographic encounters and intimate interactions. Through the wearing of re-imagined hybrid animal costumes, such as the mischievous wolf, the ceremonial lagomorph, the inquisitive alchemist, the tartan hybrid, the leather busting queer cruiser and the overheated rabbit.
In unconventional and performative methods I test how multispecies identities might be embodied. In the exhibition, visitors responded in unexpected ways: some reported feeling seen, unsettled, or invited into a kind of silent dialogue. One neurodivergent student, previously non-verbal in class, spoke afterwards for the first time. These moments are not easy to measure, however I feel they are important. They show that artistic practice can produce meaningful knowledge, felt through the body, shared through space, and lived beyond the moment of performance. (in the thesis you can find more information in relation to the exhibition on page 93)
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Horse boy photograph Spike Mclarrity. 2025 Poster designed by Liv England 2025
Horse Boy with the hybrids: Photograph by Spike Mclarrity 2025
Blurring Boundaries: Becoming Hybrid
One moment during the exhibition caught me completely off guard. A student, who had no intention of visiting the show, as he was not aware that it was on, unexpectedly found himself in the exhibition space. Instead of going to his classroom, he was guided by his friends, drawn by curiosity or mischief, into the world of the hybrids.
He appeared like a conceptual vision, passing the gallery window, wearing a latex horse mask. Unable to see, surrounded and guided by the direction of his friends. Avoiding the route that would take them to the class room, instead they led him to the re-imagined Mad Hatter’s tea party, where he stood among the hybrid figures, becoming one of them. For a brief time, he wasn’t a student, he was part of the scene, unaware of how fully he had stepped into the work.
It was only when he removed the mask, his red hair lit by daylight streaming through the gallery window, his face flushed with sweat and disorientation, that he saw the reality of which he had become part of. What started as a prank had become something else: an unintentional crossing of roles and identities. He had become hybrid. In that moment I became the observer.
This encounter, captured in the photograph above, now lives here in this archive, not as documentation alone, but as a trace of the third performative space this project explores. The happening was not staged or controlled. It was a live and a shared existential moment, where the boundaries between human and animal, student and artwork, dissolving if only briefly the institutional structure.
This is the essence of A Hybrid Nation: to hold space for these unpredictable, transformative encounters where practice and theory, humour and seriousness, costume, self and social boundaries all blur together.
In this exhibition, the costumes took on new roles, they were no longer just vehicles for performance but became active participants in their own right. By placing them quietly on display, I invited viewers to engage with the costumes as objects full of presence and potential, rather than through movement alone. This approach opened up a space where the usual boundaries between maker, wearer, and observer began to blur.
The presence of the hybrid costumes did not lessen their impact; instead, it revealed layers of meaning held within their materiality, history, and silent gestures.
This allowed the work to speak differently, through atmosphere, texture, and invitation, reflecting a neurodivergent sensitivity to alternative ways of knowing and being. The exhibition, situated within an educational setting, created an unexpected hybrid zone, displacing conventional ideas of performance and knowledge. It became a place where stillness was a form of being, and where hybridity could be quietly witnessed, felt, and shared in the most unlikeliest environment.
This practice-based reflection is central to the digital archive. Here, the exhibition and the costumes exist not just as static objects but as living markers of transformation, showing how research can unfold through making, seeing, and sitting with the work over time. The archive holds this tension between activation and stillness, reminding us that knowledge is not only spoken or written but embodied, relational, and always evolving. It also invites another way of engaging, hovering the mouse over the screen, moving from page to page, giving time to observe, explore and in doing so entering into the digital dimension of hybridity, this is another way to experience and engage with the work.
As Nelson (2013, p. 26) writes, “The practice, whatever it may be, is at the heart of the methodology of the project and is present as substantial evidence of new insights.” In my case, the practice doesn’t sit outside the research, it is the research. The exhibition, with its quiet gathering of hybrids, offered more than a backdrop to the written thesis. It provided the very substance through which new knowledge emerged. The costumes, placed with care in the gallery, were not just remnants of past performances but carried the weight of experience, transformation, and intention.
Their presence made visible the questions that drive this research: How can hybridity be embodied? What happens when stillness replaces performance? How does neurodivergence shape the making and receiving of artistic work in public institutions?
Though the performance itself could not be re-lived, the exhibition created a tactile and affective space where the work could be encountered differently. It offered the kind of experiential insight Nelson refers to, something that can’t always be translated into words but can be deeply felt. In this sense, the hybrid costumes acted as anchors for memory, engagement, and experience. They invited visitors to step into that third space, between performer and viewer, animal and human, researcher and witness, where something shared could still happen.
Hybrids on their thrones photograph by Spike Mclarrity 2025
Costumed hybrids in seated Stillness
Seated silently on handmade thrones, these costumed figures, the Hybrid Cruiser, the Lagomorph, the Wolf, the Alchemist, and the Hybrid Clan, The Cruiser, and the White Rabbit hold court with quiet intensity. Activated through live performance, sitting together as a collective in a moment of stillness, with an un-apologetic presence. Each hybrid is a re-imagined drawn from fragments of animal, human, memory, and instinct. They are not identities to be explained, but otherness to experience. Their exaggerated forms and ambiguous identities resist institutional categorisation, reflecting the neurodivergent logic of the practice itself, where meaning is shaped through sensation, association, and relational response, rather than a neurotypical narrative.
Placed within the context of an educational institution, these creatures displace the norms of the space. They interrupt the expected flow of academic routines with their strangeness, demanding different ways of knowing and sensing. They do not ask to be understood through theory alone, but through encounter, through feeling watched, welcomed and unsettled. Their placement is intentional: a kind of occupation that inserts embodied, emotional, and multispecies presence into a site of institutional learning. In doing so, they transform the gallery into a third space, neither classroom nor stage, but a hybrid zone where alternative modes of being and learning can emerge.
Costumed hybrids in seated Stillness
Seated silently on handmade thrones, these costumed figures, the Hybrid Cruiser, the Lagomorph, the Wolf, the Alchemist, and the Hybrid Clan, The Cruiser, and the White Rabbit hold court with quiet intensity. Activated through live performance, sitting together as a collective in a moment of stillness, with an un-apologetic presence. Each hybrid is a re-imagined drawn from fragments of animal, human, memory, and instinct. They are not identities to be explained, but otherness to experience. Their exaggerated forms and ambiguous identities resist institutional categorisation, reflecting the neurodivergent logic of the practice itself, where meaning is shaped through sensation, association, and relational response, rather than a neurotypical narrative.
Placed within the context of an educational institution, these creatures displace the norms of the space. They interrupt the expected flow of academic routines with their strangeness, demanding different ways of knowing and sensing. They do not ask to be understood through theory alone, but through encounter, through feeling watched, welcomed and unsettled. Their placement is intentional: a kind of occupation that inserts embodied, emotional, and multispecies presence into a site of institutional learning. In doing so, they transform the gallery into a third space, neither classroom nor stage, but a hybrid zone where alternative modes of being and learning can emerge.
Gaze Interrupted photograph by Arnhel de Serra 2024
A masked hybrid and a real dog meet by accident, two presences caught in a shared moment of unspoken recognition.
In the above photograph, The Hybrid Cruiser is captured wearing full leather gear, a straightjacket, heavy boots, and a wolf-like obscured mask. What makes the image striking is the sudden appearance of a black Labrador beside the figure. I was being photographed by the photographer called Arnhel de Serra, testing the costume for a performance in Madrid. The dog wasn’t planned. It simply appeared, quietly, and stood next to me, alert, upright, watching. I didn’t notice it at the time. In the image, it stands with its tail raised, poised and slightly defensive, staring directly at the hybrid figure. The Cruiser looks toward the camera. Two different creatures, two different gazes, two different positions, one conscious, the other instinctual. (The hybrid cruiser is discussed on page 73 in the thesis.)
This moment speaks directly to Derrida’s (2008, p. 3) question: "Since so long ago, can we say that the animal has been looking at us? What animal? The other." The photograph becomes more than documentation. It holds tension, between species, between the expected and the unknown, between the invisible and the visible, what is experienced for those who encounter these unruly eclectic gathering of hybrids. In that unexpected moment of encounter, the boundaries between performer and animal, self and other, blur. De-serra's image captures not just the hybrid but the act of hybridity itself: being both visible and unseen, watched and watching, human and non-human.
These hybrids aren’t meant to re-present a single animal or person. They are in constant transition, flitting between being, part creature, part costume, part memory or dream, in the same way that people describe their heritage, being part of another culture. They unsettle fixed categories, crossing cultural boundaries inviting us to rethink what we assume about identity, bodies, and belonging.
This connects to Derrida’s challenge to the idea of “the animal” as a single, unified category. He writes:
“If certain animals dream but-not all, and not all in the same way- what sense is there in using this noun in the singular (the animal)…?” (Derrida, 2008, p. 62)
In the same way, the hybrids in this exhibition resist being reduced to one meaning. They are layered, shifting with expectation, with complexity, with a multiple layering of DNA, which is hard to pin down. Like dreams, they come from somewhere deeper, somewhere emotional, subconscious, even collective. They don’t just sit still on their thrones. They suggest other ways of being.
In the context of a neurodivergent practice, the hybrids reflect a way of thinking and creating that doesn’t always follow neurotypical structures. Instead, it values hyperactivity, movement, emotions, texture, association, and the 'hybrid' grey space between definitions. Displacing them inside an institutional college gallery, they challenge and question the rules, what counts as knowledge, who gets to speak, how difference is held. They offer another kind of invitation: not just to look, but to become something else with them, and enter the dream of becoming other alongside them, as one student demonstrated by randomly turning up in an horse mask. (see photograph above)
A masked hybrid and a real dog meet by accident, two presences caught in a shared moment of unspoken recognition.
In the above photograph, The Hybrid Cruiser is captured wearing full leather gear, a straightjacket, heavy boots, and a wolf-like obscured mask. What makes the image striking is the sudden appearance of a black Labrador beside the figure. I was being photographed by the photographer called Arnhel de Serra, testing the costume for a performance in Madrid. The dog wasn’t planned. It simply appeared, quietly, and stood next to me, alert, upright, watching. I didn’t notice it at the time. In the image, it stands with its tail raised, poised and slightly defensive, staring directly at the hybrid figure. The Cruiser looks toward the camera. Two different creatures, two different gazes, two different positions, one conscious, the other instinctual. (The hybrid cruiser is discussed on page 73 in the thesis.)
This moment speaks directly to Derrida’s (2008, p. 3) question: "Since so long ago, can we say that the animal has been looking at us? What animal? The other." The photograph becomes more than documentation. It holds tension, between species, between the expected and the unknown, between the invisible and the visible, what is experienced for those who encounter these unruly eclectic gathering of hybrids. In that unexpected moment of encounter, the boundaries between performer and animal, self and other, blur. De-serra's image captures not just the hybrid but the act of hybridity itself: being both visible and unseen, watched and watching, human and non-human.
These hybrids aren’t meant to re-present a single animal or person. They are in constant transition, flitting between being, part creature, part costume, part memory or dream, in the same way that people describe their heritage, being part of another culture. They unsettle fixed categories, crossing cultural boundaries inviting us to rethink what we assume about identity, bodies, and belonging.
This connects to Derrida’s challenge to the idea of “the animal” as a single, unified category. He writes:
“If certain animals dream but-not all, and not all in the same way- what sense is there in using this noun in the singular (the animal)…?” (Derrida, 2008, p. 62)
In the same way, the hybrids in this exhibition resist being reduced to one meaning. They are layered, shifting with expectation, with complexity, with a multiple layering of DNA, which is hard to pin down. Like dreams, they come from somewhere deeper, somewhere emotional, subconscious, even collective. They don’t just sit still on their thrones. They suggest other ways of being.
In the context of a neurodivergent practice, the hybrids reflect a way of thinking and creating that doesn’t always follow neurotypical structures. Instead, it values hyperactivity, movement, emotions, texture, association, and the 'hybrid' grey space between definitions. Displacing them inside an institutional college gallery, they challenge and question the rules, what counts as knowledge, who gets to speak, how difference is held. They offer another kind of invitation: not just to look, but to become something else with them, and enter the dream of becoming other alongside them, as one student demonstrated by randomly turning up in an horse mask. (see photograph above)