Image credits: Lazarus Gordon
Lazarus Gordon
Costuming and Character
SAT 09 AUG 10:00AM—2:00PM
Tickets: $15 +BF
Platform Arts Performance Space
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Learn how to visit Platform Arts, including standard opening hours and full accessibility information, via our contact us page.
Wheelchair access is via our Gheringhap St entrance ramp. Unlocked, accessible bathrooms available on both ground and first floors.
Join Geelong performance artist and textile designer Lazarus Gordon in an artist-led costume construction and character-building workshop.
Lazarus, the mastermind behind Queery This, is an award-winning fashion and wearable art designer whose practice spans social and street performance. The characters of Lazarus are his ‘children,’ birthing through a process of self discovery and release before merging into the world. These characters have stories, histories, dreams and visions of their own. For Lazarus, to costume and character-build is an acknowledgement of these children as cultural and phantasmagoric agents of the multiverse.
Lazarus has a deep commitment to a waste-free arts practice and will bring some found and collected items. Participants should bring their own preferred materials, fabrics and tools. Places are limited to 20 people, so register to reserve a place!
Participants will be invited to return and showcase their costumes and characters during the After Walter Hops exhibition at Platform Arts on October 11 during the Salon season and ROAM festival on Little Malop street.
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Lazarus is a queer, sustainable designer of fashion, wearable art, and accessories. Inspired by their own constantly shifting sense of gender and identity, their work invites wearers to escape the ordinary to become someone—or something else—to discover the freedom of exploring your own sense of self.
Lazarus’s journey to designing costume and fashion began as an adolescent, jump-scaring strangers annually at their family’s Halloween set-up, putting costumes together from whatever trash and scrap they could find and cobble together. Many years later, after a theatrical departure from America, they were still spooking strangers (accidentally this time) as a living statue performer on the streets of Geelong and Melbourne.
Becoming these curious characters opened them to exploring themselves and their own self-representation, resulting in the lines between style and fantasy blurring until the two combine into an avant garde form of style and expression. Lazarus founded Queery This and debuted the runway show Queer By Design through Melbourne/s Revival Runway in 2024. This became an open invitation for anyone to Queery This and question everything.
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10am - Workshop start
Lazarus will present an artist talk on his personal practice and demonstrate and introduce some of the costumes and characters in his collection.
10:30 - This will be followed by a group exercise, story sharing and presentation of practice and character ideas.
11:00am Lazarus will guide participants through a skills and technique session such as weaving, binding and stitching and share how to wear and perform the character. Time will be given to developing the backstory, name and character of your creation.
11:30 - Making and construction time guided by Lazarus
12:30 - break
12:50 Making and costume construction continues followed by presentation of work in progress and performance of character
1:30pm - Show and tell by participants.
2pm finish
