Lauric Mahé-Stephenson

Lauric Mahé-Stephenson (b. 1998) is a French-British visual artist working across moving image, photography, writing, print and digital painting. His works seek to build complex worlds where queer identity and monstrosity merge to embody a liberated sense of identity and sexuality. With a background in fashion and film, Lauric works both within experimental fiction and commercial filmmaking, creating powerful visuals and developing new pathways of expression. His BA in Film Studies at King’s College London has encouraged him to look at film and art in a more historical and sociological context, while actively engaging in contemporary debates around race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Using fantasy and folklore, his current project revolves around the creation of a corpus of Queer Fairy tales, both new and familiar, which reclaim and bend conventional archetypes. His multimedia practice enables him to develop and expand these narratives across different media, offering a varied and textured world for audiences to delve in. Throughout these works, he uses ideas of monstrosity as an empowering representation of queer identity and sexuality, thus reversing societal binaries and exploring the possibilities of limitless bodies.

Release the Succubus! Release your demons! Release your desires! Release your love!

Throughout this year’s body of works, I want to celebrate stories of sexual awakening and gender fluidity, of limitless bodies and infinite minds that merge and wrap into one another. These Queer stories cannot be merely generated by a programme or credibly rehashed by the machine-like structure of media conglomerates. For their representation is far too limited in history to form a sufficiently large database to recombine and readapt infinitely. This is particularly striking in comparison to the abundant heteronormative romances that overflow our collective subconscious. Instead, Queerness is perceived as monstruous, a curse that one must carry with them and navigate with, and recent narratives have done little to amend this vision.

So how does one go about to create these Queer tales? To own monstrosity, for it is what allows us to live our individuality to the fullest. The monster cannot be kept in the closet and must instead be let out in the open, free to roam and thrive. For it is far too grand and animated to be tamed. Then, to write these tales, a profound work of excavation that must be carried out, with hidden narratives that have been censored, dumbed down or reappropriated. One takes the duty of a historian to correct these heteronormative mistakes. And, more importantly, these experiences must be lived and embodied to be told, testaments of their vulnerable humanity. To then open one’s heart is to share the happiness, the sadness or the anger through rich stories that might stimulate or excite another’s imagination.

Guided by the figure of the Succubus, I have spent my final year of MA excavating the fairy tales, folklore and myths that have shaped our collective subconscious, whilst also deconstructing the Christian ideology and iconography that I grew up with. The sleep-demon became an anchor point to my artistic intentions, a reminder of the queer bodies and monsters I want to celebrate and put forward. What resulted from this work is a multimedia corpus of tales, both new and familiar, which I now present to you through this online show. I now wish you an enthralling trip down the cave of the Succubus.