Born 1998

Graduated from Central Saint Martins with a distinction foundation diploma in art and design (2018)

Graduated from Central Saint Martins BA Fine Art with first-class honours (2021)

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

ABOUT THE ARTIST

define (practice)
 
// Beyond binaries
Introspection into my own ‘uncanny’ gender has led a conceptual enquiry into the similarities between the experiences of sub-humans in sci-fi, specifically aliens and androids, and the experience of transgender people, both of which are alienated from the category of human. I examine identities that are beyond binary categories: man or woman, man or machine, and human or Other. By creating alien spaces for alienated beings, I explore reclaiming the space outside the human, in a manner that does not adhere to cisheteronormativiy. This theoretical approach is grounded in posthuman queer theory, specifically the writings of Micha Cárdenas, and the dissolvement of categories in Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto.
 
// The work is a queering of reality
I create post-screen, portal-like, digital encounters with strange forms. As with Mark Fisher’s concept of ‘the Weird’, the pieces are unbelonging and yet exist, thus proving our categories of classification fall short.
 
// The work does not strive to pass*
The pieces themselves operate queerly, by refusing to visually explain themselves, through both abstract forms, and by not immediately revealing their conceptual grounding. This refusal to explain itself is an act of turning away from cishetero recognition, which has refused to classify trans people as human rather than Other. Thus, the work decentralises the colonialist ideas of hierarchies of being on which the power of recognition is built.
 
Due to its refusal to explain, the work can be interpreted differently by an audience, therefore becoming multiplicitous; existing as multiple meanings at once due to creating different perceptions, and thus providing a self that is not a singularity.
 
// The work is not a simulation
The work is not a representation of the transgender and transhuman experience but is the experience itself, evoking the feeling of unbelonging and posthuman out of body sensations. This concept of reality versus simulation (self or avatar) questions the performativity of gender, and the performativity of the human.
 
// Form is not immutable
The work utilises abstract, dreamlike, forms which are not interested in replicating reality or reproducing the societal norm. Instead forms fluidly morph, showing self as changeable.
 
// Agency to objects and the objectified
The pieces often contain technological elements, through which I question authorship, posthuman bodily extensions and unbecoming human. Through the installation of the work, the technology and materials involved alter the result, giving agency to the inanimate, and letting the work become co-authored by its components.
 
The installations give a ‘real world’ life to noncorporeal, ethereal, intangible forms. The fluidity of the digital, and its disregard for physical restraints are translated by using materials that themselves do not have much ‘body’ and are changeable, influenced by their surroundings, performative materials, such as dust sheets and mirrors.
 
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*’passing’ is where a trans person is perceived as cis (not trans), and is a term I also use to describe non-humans ‘passing’ as human.

2021 Longlisted for the MullenLowe NOVA Award

2021 Shortlisted for the Barry Martin Award

2021 Shortlisted for the SID Motion Gallery Award

2020 Hollyport Capital Prize Winner

2019 Jackson Open Painting Prize Longlist

2016 Winifred Knights Scholarship

Awards

Articles