Iffytown EP

Research Background Iffy Town EP investigates the abject, the scatological, and the corporeal through an expanded sculptural and painterly practice that confronts mortality and bodily processes. Building on art historical engagements with the grotesque—from medieval gargoyles to Mike Kelley's explorations of repressed materiality—this project mobilizes excremental imagery as a site of philosophical inquiry into life's cyclical nature. The work employs Dwyer's signature heterogeneous material vocabulary, combining traditional artistic mediums (painting, sculpture) with everyday objects transformed through processes of smearing, piping, and surface manipulation. Colour operates as both aesthetic and ecological signifier, engaging with recent scientific research demonstrating how climate change threatens biological pigmentation—from bleaching coral reefs to declining pollinator populations that diminish floral coloration, and butterflies and insects losing vibrancy as their habitats degrade. Eyes, mirrors, and light sources function as surveillant elements within installations that refuse sanitized gallery aesthetics. The exhibition's title references the "extended play" format, suggesting both musical seriality and theatrical performance, positioning the work as an ongoing episodic exploration rather than a finite statement. Research Significance This research contributes to critical discourse surrounding abjection theory, particularly Julia Kristeva's formulations of the abject as that which disturbs identity and order. By centring excremental materiality, the work challenges bourgeois notions of taste and decorum that have historically policed artistic production. The project advances feminist reclamations of bodily knowledge, positioning processes of elimination and decay as generative rather than purely destructive. The "flowering spectre" introduces memento mori traditions into contemporary practice, examining how beauty and decomposition coexist while referencing the climate crisis's threat to chromatic biodiversity. Colour itself becomes a site of mourning and urgency, acknowledging that pigmentation—whether in nature or art—exists within precarious ecological systems. The work's significance lies in its refusal of binary thinking—life/death, beautiful/repugnant, high/low—instead proposing a continuum where transformation occurs through material degradation and reconfiguration. The surveillant gaze created by eyes and mirrors implicates viewers in the work's scatological fantasy, destabilizing comfortable spectatorship. Research Contribution Iffy Town EP contributes methodologically by demonstrating how installation practice can engage visceral, taboo subject matter without resorting to shock tactics or literalism. The work expands understanding of how artists negotiate disgust as an aesthetic category and philosophical provocation. By framing the exhibition as an "extended play," Dwyer contributes to discourse on seriality, duration, and the unfinished in contemporary art—positioning artworks as iterative processes rather than completed objects. The research validates scatological content as legitimate terrain for exploring existential questions about embodiment, mortality, and material transformation. Through its heterogeneous material application, the project models how artists can maintain conceptual coherence while embracing formal multiplicity, contributing to expanded definitions of what constitutes painting and sculpture in contemporary practice.