Artist Statement

Boundaries did not shiver to birth my body.
I did not come out through red velvet walls.
My tail wrapped around my neck, suffocating my gills, my lungs.
I was cut out of my mother, her belly lying on the table, under anesthesia.
Snip, snip.
Mr. Doctor slit my lingering scaly tail and my eyes unlocked.
Turquoised light too bright to eat flooded into my sockets and made me weep.
The light melted into tears, stinging my lids.
The tears puddled into a reservoir, my eyeballs in the deep end.
My body could not see so I could not breathe. I could not breathe.
I did not open my eyes for the first three months.
My iris disintegrated from baby blue to jaundice to black.
In these ninety days I fasted, no food no water.
I was crucified between two thieves.
My body pierced with a spear.
Blood and water gushed out my crib.
I swallowed ice I swallowed glass I swallowed a knife.
When I awoke my eyes were crimson flames.
The first image I ever saw was my dangling mobile of the solar system.
And I was the sun, my father’s son.
Too hot for my eight pound body, my eyes liquefied everything in sight.
My nursery melted around the crib.
The walls collapsed, the partitions crumbled, the windows shattered.
Boundaries did not shiver to birth my body.
But ninety days later my eyes queered every picture every barrier in my family manor.

Bio

Nathan Storey Freeman is a Texan born artist living and working in New York. His work
performs as a queering of time and space, exploring demystification, the circulation of imagery,
and traces of the body. He received his Bachelors of Fine Arts from New York University in 2018
with a concentration in printmaking and performance. Storey Freeman’s work has been exhibited
in New York, Berlin, and Houston.