What are little boys made of?
Who is the boy?
What are little boys made of?
I’ll tell you what little boys are made of!
Lipstick and heels and little blue dresses
Club nights, fucking
Flowers In presses
Twisted calf carcases
Dead frogs in trees
Judy, Joan and Nina
Gurl please!
Pink fluffy rats
blue Cinderella shoes
Pears, dildos
Drugs and booze
Sewing a blanket
Tea with Gran
Trinkets
Charity shops
Loving my man
Sickly sweet letters
Party bag treats
Tinder and Grindr
Perverted creeps
Horseback riding
Growing veg
Kitten heals, mascara
A blow job behind a hedge
Singing in the choir
decorating the tree
Finding out Santa is really daddy
Pink fluffy rats
Blue Cinderella shoes
Janis Joplin singing the blues
Working on farms
bludgeoning mice
Sugar and spice
all things nice
Dogs that bark
neon beds
Play balls
Fences
Words sewn in threads
Pink fluffy rats
Blue Cinderella shoes
Pearls and dildos
Drugs and booze
The Boy-Painting, Benjamin Martin, 2017
Identity has become a core part of my art practice; this is rooted in a desire to uncover my own personal struggles with gender and masculinity and in looking at the wider social and political implications of these subjects. This has been partially shaped by my own personal encounter working with children in nursery school settings and seeing how in particular binaries of gender are enforced from a young age.
“What are little boys made of?” has been the title for many of my art works, including a performance piece, texts, photographs, made objects and drawings/paintings. The title “What are little boys made of?” comes from the famous childhood poem thought to have been written Robert Southey. The poem encompasses many of the ideas that I have been researching and using within my current practice. Gender and childhood are clearly indicated within the text, highlighting gender norms and binaries which are still pervasive throughout society. Using very childlike imagery and narratives the poem seeks to disembowel and compartmentalise girls, boys, men, women into very succinct categories. The original version was much longer and may have originally been titled “What all the world is made of?”, which makes the subject of this text even more potent in terms of the implications of gender binaries on society and indeed the world.
The idea of ‘the boy’ within my work has become a metaphor for my struggles with gender binaries and with masculinity. Using the word boy, opposed to using the word man, aims to fix the origin of the body as a gendered entity within childhood.