Meet the local artist reframing queer identities through her work
Collage by Hundred Acre Goods.
Kirra Christine, artist name “Hundred Acre Goods,” is a multimedia artist whose work centres around identity and tenderness. She creates artwork that relates to her perspective and the way she interacts with the world as a queer person.
Christine landed on the name because her favourite fictional character, Winnie-the-Pooh, lives in the Hundred Acre Wood — and she wants her work to re-inspire a child-like sense of wonder, which is what Winnie-the-Pooh stories did for her as a kid.
Christine has been an artist her whole life. She began her professional life making and selling her art full-time. However, after a year, she began to experience burnout. Making more art, she realized, did not always mean feeling more fulfilled. In time, she discovered what “success” meant to her — when people have genuine interactions with her work, and when people value her artistic viewpoint.
Nature and the people around her are both major sources of inspiration for Christine. For her collages, she takes inspiration from how the people around her relate to their queer identities, and from the relationships she observes.
Collage by Hundred Acre Goods.
Her collages often centre a sexually explicit image that is associated with narratives which misrepresent — and often harm — the demographics of people in them. She combines these images with other material, intentionally reframing the image with a new, more positive narrative.
To Christine, reclamation is about the context that an image is framed through. “A lot of my pieces are about creating an identity . . . that’s been lost through set dressing, and creating a persona for these people in these images,” she said.
When making her collages, Christine thinks about what matters to her as a queer person. Some of her pieces explore the way that queer sex is viewed by people who don’t understand it. She reframes images of queer sex so they can be viewed as being a valuable experience for the people involved, rather than only being valuable for the gratification they give other people. This work allows for an exploration of queer sex without the constraints of a heteronormative perspective.
In her piece Happiness is Like Honey, Christine wanted to move narratives surrounding images of two women being intimate away from how “hot” the experience is for viewers.
Christine does a lot of work to remove the centre images of her collages from their original context. Despite her effort, her message is sometimes misconstrued by those who have consumed the original media. Women have come to her stall, for example, and told her that “[their] husband would love this.” Heterosexual couples have also bought her work due to sexual gratification they gain from the central image.
Collage by Hundred Acre Goods.
Reactions to Christine’s work range from wholesome to harmful. She has had heartwarming interactions with queer people who connect deeply with her art. She has also, however, been called a “freak” for making the art that she does. However, she takes those negative interactions in stride and uses them as inspiration to continue creating.
Her pieces The Real Garden of Eden and To Please Your Tastes, in her words, “[exemplify] the inherent beauty and undefinable nature of queer intimacy.” Christine told the Martlet that women and non-men often get asked the question “how does that work?” when asked about sex. Underlying this question, she says, is the idea that there is “one golden way” to have sex. Instead, Christine explores an alternative idea in her work: “You don’t have to understand everything about everybody, and that’s okay.”
Christine always appreciates support from people buying her art, but she finds equal value in attendance at markets and other events where she shares her work, where she encourages people to ask questions, and engage in conversations. Christine’s artwork can be found at @hundredacre.goods on Instagram, as well as at the SUBtext bookstore on campus.
