Veils and Walls

England, United Kingdom

I feel it is important to humanise transpeople as a great deal of focus is on their physicality, appearance, and biology. My work is Expressionistic and emotional to highlight the humane and personal experience. Through my work I want to represent struggle, shame, fear, embarrassment, self-consciousness and pain, yet at the same time resilience. Emotional and mental wellbeing are things that are so necessary as we live in a society where there is so much expectation especially placed upon our image. For transpeople this is an extra pressure as they are very much judged on their ability to fit into the binary idea and image of the world. My work exposes this social pressure of fitting in, but also to try and take ownership of our bodies, humanity, and dignity more. By obscuring my appearance I am saying it is not okay to judge and scrutinise transpeople in this way. It is not okay to reduce us to just our surfaces, but to say we are also feeling, soulful, characterful, experienced, and layered, complex human beings just like anyone else.

I use my paper cutting to express the inside outwardly. Art is something internal and can bloom outwardly when made tangible, and this reflects so beautifully how we all are at the end of the day, someone inside being someone outside. Although my work contains a great deal of hurt, essentially it is about inner strength, hope, compassion, and a celebration of what transpeople have to go through everyday in order to find basic autonomy and peace within.

2021

hand cut interfacing and photography

11.5 x 8 inches

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