Becoming the flaming creature

Becoming the Flaming Creature is a transdisciplinary thesis exploring sculpture, scent, performance, and poetry through the lens of queer embodiment, material experimentation, and transformation. Drawing on the legacy of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) and the metaphor of the scavenger, the project considers queerness as both method and matter—fluid, provisional, and process-based. Across this body of work, materials such as latex, beeswax, paper pulp, clay, scent are mobilized not for permanence, but for their capacity to leak, rupture, and reform by mirroring cycles of care and the internal mechanics of the body. The accompanying sample of the poem chapbook, Dog Custody, extends these gestures through a language that bruises and breathes—treating text as flesh, metabolizing desire, grief, and power. Across media, the work offers an aesthetic of the unfinished: a queer alchemy where nothing is stable, and everything becomes.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Fine Arts

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Sculpture & Extended Media

Grantor

The University of Texas at Austin

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Matis-Uzzo, Miles

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Williams, Jeff, M.F.A.

Committee member dc:contributor.committeemember

• Spector, Hannah

• Art
• Contemporary art
• Sculpture

Language dc:language.iso

English

Identifier URI

https://doi.org/10.26153/tsw/61768

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/134445