Artist statement

I am a transgender male. My work is an investigation into my life experiences that involve my two different perspectives of being male and female. When making this artwork I try to demonstrate positive emotions from the negative, showing the viewer concepts and concerns about gender.

I engage with these concepts through different mediums, for example, I have made colleges that were stickers called “Flesh Flowers”. I used two different trans bodies in this piece to represent the trans-feminine and trans-masculine bodies. This piece was about dysphoria and how it chops your body image apart. To stop the crude comments about nudity and flesh, I changed the colour and the shape of a flower so there’s a balance between the violence and softness of the piece. This meant the audience felt invited to invade our privacy.

My work is hugely influenced by Heather Cassils- another transgender artist who uses their body as an interior and exterior to represent historic LGBTQ* struggles. I am also influenced by the book called ‘Alternative Femininities, body, age and identity’, Holland describes masculinities and femininities as consciousness and identity. Our consciousness comes what’s around us in the world and our identity is represented as what we do with these experiences. Therefore, this shows our masculinities and femininities become an act that we perform in between.