Jake Wood

The Birth of Beefcakes

2024

   Live durational performance 

The Birth of Beefcakes, 2024, live durational performance, QUEERCALL Festival, Folkestone, Kent. Captured by Manual Vason

For QUEERCALL Festival, Jake presented a new durational performance 'The Birth of Beefcakes' which considers the absurd nature of fitness & the history of gay physique culture, where the male body functions as an object of desire.

As part of the QUEERCALL development programme, Jake received residency time at Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage at Dungeness. The Birth of Beefcakes has been partly inspired by spending time in the cottage & from creating performative interventions in the celebrated garden. Jake considers Jarman’s garden itself as an intervention in the landscape & as a sculptural stage set in which to perform.

Finding connections in his own practice to that of Jarman, Jake is inspired by the performance of masculinity in films such as Sebastian and Edward II, & from images of body builders in Jarman’s sketchbooks, which takes ideas of the body, sculpture & spectacle as points of departure and which questions ideas of queer desire.