In June 2013, police armed with Stanley knives raided Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts in St Kilda, Melbourne, where they carefully removed sections of a work on display.
The work in question – Everything Is Fucked, by Melbourne artist Paul Yore – was part of a group exhibition inspired by the late Mike Brown, the only Australian artist successfully prosecuted for obscenity.
The material excised from Yore's work depicted children's faces pasted onto nude adult bodies, some engaged in sex acts, and was part of a larger work challenging ideas about sexual identity and commercialisation in society.
"The work couldn't be understood once it had been cut up — its meaning had been altered," Yore said recently on ABC RN's The Art Show.
Police charged Yore, 25 at the time, with child pornography offences, and the artist faced 15 years in jail if found guilty.
In October 2014, a judge dismissed the charges against the artist and ordered police to pay costs.
It was a harrowing time for Yore, considered one of Australia's most promising artists since his debut solo exhibition at Melbourne's Heide Museum of Modern Art, in 2009.
Just days before the raid, Yore had won the $8,000 Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award for Map, a wool tapestry that took him six months to complete by hand.
In the aftermath of the raid and subsequent court case, Yore left Melbourne, and considered quitting the art world.
"I definitely had a moment where I thought, well, this is the end of my career," he says.
He turned his attention to researching outsider art and folk art, traditions characterised by marginality.
Engaging with the work of people "who wouldn't even identify as artists … [or didn't have] any exposure to the art world" reaffirmed his need to express himself through his artistic practice.
Art, he saw, was his "survival mechanism" and a type of therapy.
"I realised the logical thing for me to do was to make art, and so I was drawn back into creating," he says.
Word made flesh
Yore, now 35, is the subject of a major exhibition currently at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) in Melbourne.
Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH is a survey of the artist's 15-year career, featuring installation, sculpture, collage, assemblage and textiles that draw on references as varied as Greek classical art and gay porn.
ACCA artistic director Max Delany, who curated the show, says Yore is one of Australia's most interesting and consequential artists.
"Paul's work is remarkable for the ambition of his engagement with text and textiles, and his embrace of both ornament and agitprop, where politics, decoration and desire sit side by side."
The exhibition, designed by Delany in collaboration with Yore's partner Devon Ackermann, is structured conceptually, spanning five themed zones: Signs, Embodiment, Manifesto, Horizon, and Word Made Flesh — the latter devoted to a major new installation commissioned by ACCA that is set to appear at Carriageworks in January as part of Sydney Festival.
The installation WORD MADE FLESH (a reference to a verse from the Gospel of John) features a dome structure, neon-lit and decorated with Yore's trademark assemblages of detritus, sitting alongside a 70s hearse covered in a mosaic of patterns, images and slogans (e.g. "Fuck Australia"), with a pink penis crowning one wheel arch and a rainbow another.
The show's overall effect is a profusion of light, colour, texture and sound peppered with profanity, protest paraphernalia, phallic imagery, religious iconography and the symbols, logos and slogans of neoliberal capitalism.
"Most visitors are astonished to witness the prodigious scope of work that Paul has produced over the past decade, not to mention the breathtaking array of artistic strategies derived from sources as diverse as rococo and the carnival-esque, dada and agitprop, punk and camp, queer-core and drag performance," says Delany.
The sensory overload of Yore's work recalls the relentlessness of 24/7 consumerist culture, delivering incisive social and political critiques of the late capitalist era.
"His work is both pleasurable in its materiality and uncomfortable in the mirror that it presents to the society in which we live," says Delany.
Using trash to create treasure
Yore takes society's refuse and transforms it into art, using trash to symbolise marginality and explore queer identity.
"As a queer artist, I'm very interested in what's marginal," he says.
Yore studied archaeology and anthropology as part of his Fine Arts degree at Monash University, and describes himself as a sort of "archaeologist" in his approach to the found materials he uses in his work.
Fascinated by trash culture and what people throw away, he's less interested in individual objects than the relationships that form when he places objects together.
By bringing trash into an art gallery, Yore reclaims unwanted objects, imbues them with new meanings, and sparks conversations about excess consumption in society.
His "bad taste" aesthetic, in all its over-the-top kitsch queerness, serves to challenge social and cultural mores.
"I'm really interested in pushing against that idea of polite society," says Yore.
He also uses humour and bad taste in his work as a kind of Trojan horse, deploying laughter to lure viewers into engaging with serious ideas.
"I draw on the bawdy, camp kind of humour that drag queens, for example, would use — and in that instance, bad taste is more like a survival mechanism and a sort of pressure valve," he says.
Religion and politics
Raised in a "staunchly Catholic" family – Yore's father, a Franciscan friar, met his mother when he was a missionary in Papua New Guinea – Yore "grew up surrounded by the ritual and the ideas of Catholicism, as well as the images and symbolism".
His relationship with Christianity became strained in his teenage years as he became more aware of his queer identity; when he was 15, he left the church.
"There was one particular day when the car rolled up at church for Sunday mass, and I just refused to go inside, and I walked home. It was a decisive moment," he recalls.
His rejection of Catholic ideology coincided with his introduction to radical politics through the anti-war movement that sprung up in response to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Yore attended protests on his own, meeting up with like-minded strangers and "embracing the language of rebellion and protest" that remains evident in his work today.
He recalls being drawn to the "immediacy of making a political placard" and the sense of "participating in something that felt meaningful".
Yore didn't publicly disclose his sexuality until he was 18, and says that being active in the protest movement "was also a way for me to channel the anger or rage that I experienced from a personal perspective of being in the closet, sent to a Catholic school … [and] of being silenced".
He has returned to the subject of religion as an adult, with the Catholic iconography of his upbringing offering rich pickings for a queer artist interested in ideas of transmutability and mysticism.
"There's a lot in that tradition that is very queer, but it's just not really talked about much – the idea of bodies in agony or ecstasy, the idea of spirits moving through time and objects and places," he explains.
Tapping into a rich tradition of textile art
More than 100 textile artworks appear in the ACCA exhibition, yet Yore says he mastered the art of needlework relatively late.
"I have a sister, and she was sent to a girls' school and had to study embroidery, and I was sent to a boys' school and had to study woodwork. We always joke to each other we would have loved to have done the other discipline," he says.
Yore "came to textiles through trauma" after he was admitted to hospital with a psychiatric illness in 2010.
Couch-bound during his recovery, he came upon some wool and canvases among his art supplies and decided to try his hand at embroidery.
It took him "a very, very long time" to finish his first piece of needlework, an embroidery about the size of a Victorian sampler.
In his medication-induced lethargy, Yore found the activity meditative.
Once finished, he realised with surprise that his toil had produced a piece of art.
Yore had unconsciously tapped into what he now recognises as the "rich tradition" of handicrafts as a source of healing.
"A lot of particularly feminist artists who reactivated craft traditions and methodologies in their work will talk … about the reparative nature of sewing and stitching … It is about putting things back together or repairing something that's worn or healing in a way," he says.
A safe place for discourse
Despite his "brushes with censorship", Yore still sees the art gallery as a safe place for discourse.
All art is symbolic, he says: "If you look closely enough, you'll just see brushstrokes, or you'll just see plastic."
Yore acknowledges his work is provocative. If a viewer is repulsed by his work, he says that's OK – if it triggers a discussion.
"Can we talk about it? That's what I find challenging; if people are unwilling even to have a conversation about something they don't like, that's when we end up in this echo chamber of culture wars and all the rest."
Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH runs until November 20 at ACCA, Melbourne.
The installation WORD MADE FLESH will appear at Carriageworks from January 5-February 26 as part of Sydney Festival.
