from fierce forms and rushing rills

 Working predominantly with found materials, I approach objects as fragments of a social and bodily history that are already charged with meaning. They carry the history of gender connotation, of function, of labour or of domestication. Through processes of cutting, welding, sewing, and stitching, I intervene in their existing structures, forcing them into states of instability. Each object becomes a hybrid body, caught between violence and care, construction and collapse. Through these works, I try to process questions of ownership over one’s own flesh, even when that flesh is mediated, constructed, or misread. While combining objects that are treated almost as if they were my own body parts, recognisable yet estranged, they transition into forms that challenge the stability of ‚realness‘ and reclaim the monstrous as a method. A queer strategy of owning, a reimagining of what bodies, materials, and identities can be when freed from the demand to make ‚sense’ or exist in a space of predictability.

This recent body of work takes leather as a central material, specifically motorcycle gear, which I dissect and reassemble into sculptural forms. Leather, like skin, is both surface and substance, both protective boundary and site of exposure. Motorcycling leather gear carries a heavy cultural coding; it speaks of masculinity, control, aggression, and toughness. It belongs to a lineage of armour, of clothing that promises safety as well as a stylised look. Yet it also slips between worlds: it appears in queer fetishism, in lesbian biker culture, in the aesthetics of subversion. When I slice it open, flatten its seams, and restitch it, it becomes a kind of queer epidermis; scarred, erotic, and uncontainable. To work with leather is to work with the idea of skin as a contested territory: a place where identity, desire, and power are negotiated. By surgically cutting open these leather objects, I am not simply transforming them; I perform a gesture that is reclaiming the body, reclaiming the right to reshape one’s own surface, as well as dismantling the masculinised shell that they represent. Similarly, trans bodies are processed through medical, legal, and cultural apparatuses that render them legitimate only under specific terms: The continued requirement that trans people be pathologised in order to access surgeries or hormones exposes the violence of a system that insists on sickness as the price of transformation. It is a haunting reminder that bodily autonomy for trans people is still conditional. My work seeks to confront that condition, to detach transformation from the discourse of illness. Working with leather as a surrogate skin gives me a feeling of reclaiming the process of gender affirming surgeries: taking apart what has been standardised, repurposing it, and letting it become monstrous on its own terms. The sculptural act becomes a way to claim transition as an act of agency rather than cure, a process of monstrous self-creation rather than repair.

The work hovers between armour and organism, between something made for battle and something sensually alive. The combination of synthetic protection gear with human hair creates a dissonance, an encounter between the mechanical and the bodily. The hair introduces a softness that undermines the aggression of the leather; it becomes a prosthetic gesture of tenderness within a field of hardness. Hair, here, functions as a marker of care, gender, and domestic ritual. Through hair, the work takes on the tension between exposure and concealment, between the desire to be seen and the violence of being looked at. Similarly strong in meaning, clothing has always been a site of regulation; an apparatus that forces bodies into gendered visibility. The question of what one is allowed to wear and what one’s clothing signifies marks the extent of cultural control over gender expression. By working with garments and materials that are heavily coded, I attempt to strip these regulations of their authority. A biker glove, a masculine emblem of protection and force, is transformed into a queer, fleshy topology. It ceases to signify control and becomes instead a surface of openness and uncertainty. The leather, once an armour, becomes a second skin that leaks, tears, and mutates.

This gesture of transformation mirrors the way trans and queer bodies constantly negotiate the relation between self, body, and social role. Being Trans makes one ask questions that most people never have to ask themselves: What makes a man a man? What makes a woman a woman? How is my body related to my social position? Such questions destabilise the assumed coherence of gender, revealing it as an ongoing negotiation. My sculptures operate within the same field of instability, materials that once had clear functions and identities now occupy ambiguous states of being, both familiar and alien. In this sense, each work becomes a reflection on recognition and monstrosity. Many people struggle to recognise the humanity of those whose gender they cannot read. To them, trans and queer bodies appear as something other, something not fully human. My work inhabits this space of estrangement intentionally. By constructing hybrid sculptural bodies from disassembled fragments, I mirror the experience of being perceived as fragmented, incoherent, or unnatural. As mentioned above, the materials I use are treated almost like body parts in surgeries, objects one might recognise but can no longer place. They exist in a state of transition, shifting the context of the whole object, just as the trans body shifts the social order that seeks to define it. The monstrous becomes a mode of articulation against the anxiety of those who look and a way to materialise the agency of those who are looked at.

Ultimately, these sculptures occupy an ambiguous terrain between the human and the monstrous, the organic and the synthetic, between recognition and estrangement. They are bodies that cannot be categorised; their materiality performs the instability of identity itself. To be monstrous, in this sense, is not to be less than human; it is to expose the fragility of what "human" means for some people. The monstrous, as I understand and materialise it, is a method, a way of inhabiting contradiction, of reclaiming the right to transform, of insisting on the multiplicity of forms that life can take. In the footsteps of Susan Stryker, these sculptural bodies refuse to conform; they revel in their excess, their hybridities, their monstrousity.