from fierce forms and rushing rills

Through the series ‘from fierce forms and rushing rills‘ I extend my ongoing study on trans embodiment and material metamorphosis, a practice that is full of resistance, reconfiguration, and the radical joy of be(com)ing otherwise. At the core lies an ongoing investigation into transformation, a persistent attempt to unmake, reshape, dismantle and recompose the known and the familiar into forms that defy categorisation.

all the cats wore junction, somebody grabbed my arm

2025

Predominantly working with found materials, I approach objects as artefacts that connect us to specific times and places. Each object imposes a series of associations, be it through its shape, materiality, or provenance. Some are wild or domesticated, others may carry a sense of gender, linking them to ideas of masculinity or femininity. Each object tells a story and evokes distant memories.

Through the process of cutting, welding, sewing and stitching, I can intervene in their existing structures, and overrule the way we regard them. Even go as far as destabilising their categorisation, leaving them in a state of ambiguity to their beholder, forcing them into in-between states.

Each sculpture is a hybrid body composed of an array of different objects. Caught somewhere between the violence of having been dissected and the attentive care of a stitch that ties them to another. Through these connections, they are given a new existence. All of the objects carry on their surface their collapse and reconstruction. Specifically focusing on a trans perspective, I interrogate the way ownership over one's own body is achieved, and the way in which self-constructed bodies hold autonomous integrity.

By combining objects and treating them almost as if they were my own body parts, recognisable yet estranged, they transition towards forms that challenge the concept of ‘realness’ and reclaim the monstrous as a state of desire. Monstrous as in ‘Frankensteins Monter’. Monstrous as in ‘a body pieced together and carefully composed’.

‘Realness’ judges the authenticity that is created in the reproduction of “the original”. It is also the quality in which someone is able to reproduce or perform behaviours, or a look, that blends into heteronormative society. It lays bare that authenticity does not reside in people or objects, but in an experienced relationship to them. I use the monstrous and the ‘unnatural’ as a queer strategy towards a reimagining of what bodies and identities can be, when freed from the demand to make ‘sense’ by heteronormative standards or exist in a space of predictability.

The body of work ‘from fierce forms and rushing rills’ uses leather as one of its predominant materials. In the series, the material is mainly sourced from motorcycle gear, which I dissect and reassemble into sculptural forms. Leather, in the same way as skin, is both a protective shell and a site of exposure. Motorcycle gear loudly speaks in a rigid language of masculinity and resilience. It speaks of armour. Its surface promises safety and seduces the wearer by guaranteeing a stylised look. Yet it also murmurs in the voice of queer fetishism, lesbian biker culture and 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.

By surgically cutting open these leather objects, I am not simply transforming them; my scalpel performs 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. The skin my knife cuts is a territory of politics. A stage upon which desire and identity are constantly being negotiated.

Similarly, trans bodies are processed through a medical, legal, and cultural apparatus that renders 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 leather protection gear and synthetic 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, becoming a surface of openness and uncertainty instead.

This gesture of transformation mirrors the way trans and queer bodies constantly negotiate the relation between self, body, and social role. Being Trans makes you ask questions that most people don't 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 negotiation; objects that once had clear functions and identities were transitioned and now occupy ambiguous states of being. They are both familiar and alien. They might ask themselves questions like: What makes a shoe a shoe? What makes a glove a glove? Hence, each work is being read the same way a Trans body is way too often being read; as a monstrosity. Because 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 intentionally inhabits this space of estrangement. As mentioned before, the materials I use are treated like body parts, objects one might recognise but can no longer place. By creating hybrid sculptural bodies from disassembled fragments, I reconstruct the experience of being perceived as fragmented, incoherent and unnatural. These sculptural bodies are as constructed as the social body I inhabit. They exist in a state of transition, shifting the context of all their parts, just like the Trans body is shifting the social order that seeks to define it. They are perceived as an in-between thing, and they are reclaiming monstrosity as a celebratory form.

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 stands for 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 to 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.

„Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire, I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts, I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. Do not trust to protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication that cloaks the groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for yourself at my expense. You are as constructed as me.“ - Susan Stryker