Soft Territories: Crossing One (part ii)

Crossing One is the first iteration of Soft Territories, an experiment from Pup and Tiger, a queer-run art space in Canterbury, UK. As we prepare to open a physical space later this year, this dispersed launch appears across both Dennis Cooper’s and Delere Press. It is a curated split-site showcase exploring porous, overlapping practices.

For me there was something fitting in placing these works as an intervention within already living online spaces as a sort of teasing out or rewilding into existing habitats. It felt true to the spirit of Soft Territories, moving gently across platforms, not to claim space but to echo through it, to fold into what’s already there. I invited artists, and this is what emerged.

~ Jared

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A recurring thread is the quiet merging of organic and synthetic forms. Folklore is retrieved and reinterpreted through queer embodiment. Personal desire, memory, culture, and identity filter through interfaces and gestures, whether sculptural, performative, or digital. These shared currents offer a way in, but they do not enclose the work.

The line between human and animal softens. Figures emerge that are part myth, part instinct, part echo, part longing, holding the strangeness of being many things at once, of remembering a wilder lineage. The work leaves space for divergence and contradiction, for the stray, the singular, and the speculative.

What binds these pieces is less a unifying theme than a shared willingness to inhabit the in-between, to remain porous to time, image, surface, and self.

Brandon J. Barnard, Arc

Somewhere between signal and story, Arc drifts across the moor like a thought half-remembered. Brandon J. Barnard’s video traces elemental markers: wind against grass, the glint of water, the orange husk of dried growth giving way to green. Created during a trip to Dartmoor guided by artist and folklorist Abigail Tinnion, the work emerges from prompts on portals, spirits, and spectral connections. Stone circles, tunnels of earth, offerings on cairns suggest a choreography of quiet thresholds. A figure appears, primal and indistinct. Impressions accumulate, atmospheric and unresolved, like the land is holding something just out of reach.

Created on a trip to Dartmoor under the guidance of artist and folklorist Abigail Tinnion, this work looks into the themes of time and places, portals, spirits, and electricity.
~ Brandon J. Barnard

To be queer and exist is to pose a persistent challenge to preconceived notions of what it is to be in the world, and consequently, our experiences often fluctuate between extremes of connection and loneliness, longing and comfort, fear and desire.
~ Thomas Arnold

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There’s something about softness that unsettles people. Maybe because it doesn’t give you anything to grip. It absorbs impact, rather than matching it. It holds contradiction without blinking. That’s not fragility; it’s technique. It’s survival. In these soft territories, artists are making maps out of memories, rituals, half-remembered instructions. They’re building worlds out of what’s been discarded, overlooked, or quietly stolen back.

i once imagined in you i had found a sort of twin,
who deigned to set me free by being good at
everything.
and in that little window where i seemed special
to you,
any notion you believed was one i believed too.
~ Jacqui Adams

We want to highlight work that does this: not work that represents identity in the expected ways, but that complicates it. Queer work that isn’t interested in explanation. Parallel work that isn’t looking for the centre. Art that stays in the room after the lights go out. If it’s neat, we’re suspicious. If it’s resolved, we’ve probably missed the point.

Jonathon Beaver, *Distributed Craft Socials*

Shruti Gaonkar and soundscape collaboration with Joe Hirst, Indigo Darpan

Tethered parcels bound in indigo yarn cluster toward a shared point. From this nexus, a single pair of headphones stretches out, echoing the installation’s quiet gravity. Indigo Darpan (indigo mirror) threads together colonial history, banned theatre, and speculative protest. Taking cues from Dinabandhu Mitra’s 19th-century play Nil Darpan, Shruti Gaonkar refracts the legacy of British indigo exploitation in India into something both intimate and unresolved. The installation unspools its story not through linear narration, but through texture and tether, suggestion and stillness. The soundscape, developed in collaboration with UK-based artist Joe Hirst, functions as a spatial ghost, polyvocal and architectural. Together, they conjure a protest not yet past, where myth and record, violence and care, remain entangled.

Indigo Darpan (indigo mirror) speaks about the British Indigo planters exploitation in India in 1800's through the lens of a then banned play called 'Nil Darpan' (Indigo Mirror written by Dinabandhu Mitra). In the polyvocal narrative the layers of facts, fiction and myths are contested, stuck, peeled, torn and rebuilt.
~ Shruti Gaonkar

They seem powerful. Made from different types of packing material, and beginning to show signs of age, these Relics are not sacred objects that are preserved for centuries because they are culturally significant. They are waste that cannot be destroyed. Like janus figures they reveal both sides of their nature: commodities to be worshipped and rubbish to be discarded, the sacred and the profane. They are relics of advanced capitalism: our legacy for future generations.
~ Dawn Woolley

This is an open and ongoing collection. It doesn’t follow deadlines or framing devices. It shows what artists are making, how they’re thinking, where they’re going. Whether the work is visual, time-based, text-driven, sound-oriented, or something that hasn’t quite been named yet, it’s present here. It surprises. It confuses a little. It doesn’t pitch a whole thesis, it simply shows where it’s working from.

Collage is an artform with recycling and repurposing at its core. I am interested in discard studies and themes around waste, trash and power systems. I am strongly influenced by punk culture and employ a DIY ethos of making something meaningful out of nothing. Currently I am making a series of Utopian works where I dismiss the dominant cultural vision of the future as apocalyptic and nihilistic and imagine a world where humans have worked together to make the world a better place for people, animals and nature with real social justice and freedom.
~ Helen Grundy

This body of work examines their experiences growing up as a working-class, Catholic, young, trans*, and neurodivergent individual. ‘Changelings’ critically engages with the societal expectations imposed on young people and the profound impact of a religious upbringing on queer youth.
~ Thistle Morgan

Selected works appear both online and in print, in dialogue with exhibitions, conversations, and whatever else unfolds. Nothing in this series is fixed. The format shifts in response to what takes shape. A soft structure for soft edges.

Animals often appear in my work. They can be friendly and naive, but also strange or uncanny. I see them as both comforting and cautionary: eager for love but also abject. Mythological and occult references reveal that they inhabit an alternate and personal inner world.
I work mainly in ceramic stoneware, combining handbuilding with wheel-thrown forms, which I alter and decorate. I’m drawn to ceramic for its contradictions: practical yet precious, familiar yet refined. It’s both kitsch and cultured — a queer medium in its own right, reflecting many of the tensions I explore.
~ Vlad Cohen

Dennis Cooper, *Zac’s Drug Binge* (GIF novel excerpt)

I think the animated GIF is a super rich thing, mostly unintentionally? For the novel, I thought of them as these crazy visual sentences. But unlike text sentences, they do all the imaginative work for you. They render you really passive. They just juggle with your eyesight, and you’re basically left battling their aggressive, looped, fireworks-level dumb, hypnotizing effects to see the images and the mini-stories/actions they contextualize.
~ Dennis Cooper

Leon Clowes, Nesting

Dylan Barr, After Orion

In After Orion, Dylan Barr traces a quiet procession through sparse woodland, a masked figure carrying a sculptural rabbit through corridors of pine trunks and long fallen needles. The forest becomes a site of watchfulness and ritual, with tree trunks striping the frame and the ground littered with twigs and memory. The figure lays the forms down gently, then joins them on the forest floor, enacting something wordless and felt. For Barr, rabbits function as both symbol and companion, deeply personal and culturally resonant. They speak to survival, vulnerability, and the persistence of presence even in absence. After Orion moves gently through the edges of perception, where gestures hold what language cannot.

Think of it: a radiant explosion of self-acceptance, where vulnerability, femininity and holding your hands a certain way isn't weakness. Wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t that affect no one's life but your own? Well tough luck buttercup. Society doesn't like that shit. So cut the gay crap.
~ Ross Compton

Sebastian Rowlands, *AH (After Hysterectomy)*

We know this kind of work matters. Not because it fixes anything, but because it makes space. It opens something. It changes the air. And in a world already overstuffed with spectacle and certainty, softness can feel like a kind of resistance. A way of insisting that presence doesn’t always have to be loud to be real. That meaning doesn’t always need a caption.

The catalyst was a sudden experience of phantom pain in 2021, where a location of a past injury began to ache without warning. I had tried to live by disavowing my past, but when my body itself began to scream out, this body-led project was abruptly born. Its purpose is to confront the phenomenon of violence as a creator and, through a process of self-discovery, to sublimate trauma into a work of art …
The creative process begins with the restoration of documentary photos left on an old feature phone. I repair areas of damage and deterioration in the old photos, part by part as needed …
~ Ryo Kajitani / 梶谷 令

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Soft Territories is curated by Jared Pappas-Kelley, artist, writer, and co-founder of Pup and Tiger. His past work has haunted places like Art Monthly, Cabinet, 3:AM Magazine, and The Rumpus, among others. His recent book Solvent Form: Art and Destruction was published by Manchester University Press, followed by the collection To Build a House that Never Ceased, with their newest, Stalking America, published by Delere Press. He’s written about ruins, disappearance, and the slippery nature of objects. Which feels relevant here. He’s also spent years building weird, independent spaces that didn’t last forever but mattered while they did. This is another one of those.

Soft Territories: Crossing One (part ii)

matthew keenan on ‘i’m not ghosting you’ by jeremy fernando