Selected Exhibitions

Bird-headed women, crocodilian monsters, and chimeric demons entangle among esoteric glowing symbols of queer power.

SweetBitter is a solo exhibition for CCA’s Intermedia programme. An emerging artist exhibition opportunity selected via open call. The show consisted of paintings created between 2023 and 2024, a time of transformation, disruption, and renewal in my personal life.

These paintings examine trans womanhood through an autosymbolist process of image making. Blending reference to historical painting and mythology with the formal interplay of symbols to create dreamlike scenes. Exploring experiences of desire and stigmatisation whilst leading viewers through (often fraught) interior landscapes filled with ambiguous figures, symbols, and formal gestures.

Whilst not all self-portraiture, the life and experience is refracted through these paintings’ surface. Unease within the body is given form as the works draw on elements of psychic and somatic disquiet, holding space for discomfort. Motifs, grotesques, and fanciful entities emerge from states of tension or conflict, creating spaces where these somatic, social, and ideological frictions can be processed.

The portions of art history her work usually respond to are often devoid of people we’d call trans women (beyond the occasional court record of a sex worker or depiction of a gender-bending Saint or pagan deity), but speak to patriarchal ideology. She takes a materialist trans-feminist perspective to these histories. Reflecting on the ways femininity has been stigmatised and bodies instrumentalised for re/productive labour.

Through these works I attempted to pick apart the way these narratives codify modern conceptions of gender, whilst imagining a trans and queer life that could transcend them.