Invisible Visible
Exhibition
hARTslane
15-24 March 2024

List of Works

1, Kelvin Atmadibrata, He/Him
Looking for “Dad“
A triptych of hand drawing and print collages hanging on the wall, gesturing a potential meaning of language beyond text. A living body appears nearby, his face partially covered by a piece of white paper, similarly sized like a page from a passport, as he slowly stamps a repetitive print on it. PAO!, it screams an onomatopoeia that perhaps suggest a playful punch but also a cry of search. The performer then will let the paper drops onto the floor, pick a fresh piece and repeat the action. The paper in between his face and the stamp makes the latter looks like a lipstick, hence the printed images may appear like kisses, or bruises maybe birthmarks. The stamped paper on the floor will accumulate over the duration of the exhibition, creating an accompanying installation for the drawings, a trace of action recorded in prints. Looking for “Dad: stamps, brands and permits identities; which may not necessarily identifiable by language, recognizable by shapes, pointable on maps not understandable by meaning. It proposes an approach beyond facial recognition as an identity that is inspired by mecha and transhumanist fantasy. The work is inspired by- in fact a homage to an owarai-drag vocal group Yazima Beauty Salon and their 2008 debut single ニホンノミカタ－ネバダカラキマシタ－ which many of the elements in the piece are borrowed from.

2.Gem Bryant, They/Them
The First Sorrow II
Playing football as a kid was somewhere I felt like I was allowed to be ‘one of the boys’, until I had to play for a girls team when I got to a certain age. I still loved football but there was an added weight to it. I had a 2008/9 season Arsenal shirt in my studio a few years back, and it was stolen. This work is about the grief I felt not only for my younger self, but for this object that represented that grief so succinctly. The image speaks to ‘seeing’ and literally ‘seeing’ myself reflected in the shirt.

3.Ros Cairns, They/Them
Tin foil hat

4.Freya Clayton-Harding, They/Them/Her
Girdle
This artwork is conceptually situated within the South Downs, in Sussex, which is where I grew up. This landscape bears ghostly echoes prehistoric and Bronze Age history, in the form of worked flints, earthworks, and most importantly the large number of ghostly tumuli, (or burial mounds/ barrows). This piece takes the form of a woolen ‘tool belt’, or ‘Girdle’, which is adorned with all manner of useful and protective items: symbolic talismans cast in pewter, (which bear imagery of tumuli, vulvic shapes and orifices, and lines of poetry), a hag stone, a piece of bark from an ancient yew tree, a fragment of blue flint from the south downs, a bottle opener, a pair of scissors, various pieces of metal chain and sea glass found mud-larking, among other things… The main body of the girdle has been naturally dyed with ivy leaves, and hand stitched together, representing a tactile and deliberate process of making. This piece is intended to be worn, crafted intentionally as a protective band, bearing artefact like relics which summon and cultivate echoes of mythology, folklore, and past queer lives and possibilities, using the burial mounds as a focus to explore themes of belonging, eroticism with the land, kinships, and longing. This piece draws on the coded lesbain and queer use of carabiners, items whuch have been historically used to signify ones identity to other queers. To many, carabiners hold a great deal of power and significance as a symbold of pride, as well being items which are functional, and facilitate the holding of tools and other useful items. Weaving together fibres of past and preset, I wanted to formulate a collective heirloom of a shared queer history, situated within our community and cultivated through a relationship with the earth. While creating this piece I was thinking a lot about feeing unsafe while travelling through different environments and rural spaces as a queer person, and wanted to craft something which could call on the protection of speculative queer legacies and ghosts through a connection with the landscape, giving weight to imagined histories as a form of empowerment and reclamation of the land and archaeology.

5.Vivienne Cohen, She/Her
Evening
This painting is a self-portrait which represents a confrontation with one’s own physical being. The piece was created during a period of isolation (during the pandemic) and emotional turbulence, translating an urge to shed one’s skin and get down to the core of oneself. The title, ‘Evening’, was chosen to create a stark contrast between the intensity and darkness of the image versus the supposed mundanity of the title. This desire to shed one’s skin alludes to feelings of gender confusion, dissatisfaction and battle with performed femininity as a queer woman situated within a heteronormative society. The title, ‘Evening’, implies how commonplace this intensity is, and how a mismatch between perception and physical body can be an everyday experience for some.

6.El Colman, They/Them
Dancing in leather
My series dancing in leather embraces queer kink culture and queer sexuality, that there is joy in it as well, that is doesn’t have to be taboo.

7.Laura Crosbie, She/They
Cut My Hair
Watercolour painting exploring discomfort within the constraints of physical appearance, and desire for change. The act of cutting hair is a quiet, but poignant act, from which much pride and relief can come. This painting ties into a wider series of work describing personal and private moments of significance, in search for identity and place.

8.Theo Dunne, They/Them
Finger Tied To A Bell
Acrylic on canvas. This work is part of my ongoing research into the significance of non-linear narratives within trans and queer experiences. Paired with a live reading of a piece of text written by me, I aim to interrogate the in between as a valid space of existence – one where a person’s worth is not measured by their destination, but rather their journey. I thought a lot about how important our queer community is to nurturing this growth, and how newer and truer lives can flourish with this support.

9.Aisling Gallagher, They/Them
All Of Us
WE ARE HERE.

WE EXIST.

WE WILL NOT BE SILENT.

WE WILL NOT BE AFRAID.

WE DESERVE SURVIVAL,

BUT MORE THAN THAT,

WE DESERVE TO LIVE.

ALL OF US.

From Alok V. Menon’s 2018 resolutions
www.alokvmenon.com/blog/2018/9/3/2018-resolutions

This piece of work was created for @TransGivingUK 2023, a not-for-profit project sending free winter care packages to trans and non-binary people across the UK. In 2021 while driving and chatting about how lonely the winter season can be for trans and non-binary people, TransGiving was born. They wanted a way to give back to the community and decided to send out affirming parcels to trans and non-binary people who may not otherwise receive anything in their chosen name. In 2023, 300 care packages were sent, including 50 postcards of this piece of work.
Please donate to the project if you are able: it is a labour of love, money is used to pay for postage, packing materials, and will enable the project to continue to offer sliding scale grants for trans makers who otherwise could not afford to contribute a piece of artwork. You can find out more about TransGiving and donate to the project here https://linktr.ee/transgivinguk

10.Lola Gillies-Creasey, They/Them
Fear cannot contain us/Gender Euphoria 
A double-sided banner bearing an inscription for trans pride 2023, marched through the streets of central London with the help of a friend. Our rights will only be won by working together. We lift each other and we lift ourselves. The hatred towards trans people is motivated by fear, of the other and of the self. They are shouting against the tide. Fear is no match for the human spirit.

11.Margaux Halloran, she/her/they
Coming out in the Heat of August
Structuring a Fluid Sanctuary
Queer Bodies
How can a body provide a home, when a numerical location on the map could not? How can home and love work as one, in severance and unity? Working in a method where the oil paint is heavily diluted using paint thinners— an untraditional framework for painting unfolds. The paint is allowed to take on its own agency. Gravity, time, and the rotation of the untreated canvas, allows for the diluted pigment to flow and soak with fluidity. There is an undertone of the individual’s mark on land and body, as we move through the world, control must be partially relinquished for narrative to unfold. The self-exploration of queer narrative through delicate lines, and larger painted stains, pays homage to the sanctuary that safety within a community has upon the individual.

12.Sally Hernández, She/Her – They/Them
Cells I- 2023,resin, menstrual blood, wool, wood, ledlight
Guided by post-materialist feminist theories of Rosi Braidotti and Karen Barad where matter has agency in itself, ” Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers”– Karen Barad, the artwork calls upon the embodiment of human matter. Concretely, menstrual blood which is made of cells, that have already come out of the body. Specifically, animal cells, which represent the basic unit of life. By inhibiting these cells, I do too my body. Taking agency of it, I reclaim it from its previous detached state, where a false dichotomy existed within. My body and identity were separated, due to my identity being submerged in a lethargic state from suffering psychological violence. “To acknowledge the embodiment of the brain and the embrainment of the body” Rosi Braidotti

13.Caitlin Howe, They /Them
This is my body
This piece explores the outline of the body, as a boundary, where you begin and end. I wanted to research ways to sense, feel and connect with the outline of our bodies using brushing and tapping. There is a focus on reclaiming our bodies, celebrating our ever-evolving outlines and putting pleasure and sensation above external aesthetic. I started this choreography, by getting my dancers to draw the outlines of their bodies onto paper and these drawings create the backdrop to the choreography as a presentation and celebration of their outlines.  

14.Anna Ill, She/Her
A(r)mour: Transit
The encounter with two palm trees, a possible armour, is the starting point of this artistic project that seeks to explore the relationship between vulnerability and protection. I’ve placed the found object in contact with the body to create a dialogue in between vulnerability, related to the body, and protection related to the object of the armour. With this visual exercise, I try to present the armour as an element that, although it always accompanies us, seeks a balance between vulnerability and protection, appearing and disappearing. The idea is to create a space where body and armour coexist. I am interested in the idea of dressing and undressing the armours, seeking a balance where the body can inhabit, transit and cohabit with the armour

15.Usva Inei, They/Them
Public Parts
This reduction woodcut print explores the lived experience of gender in public space from a non-binary point of view. When meeting new people, non-binary individuals are often faced with others’ need to place them in a binary gender. Hence our bodies and specifically our private parts suddenly become a topic of public discussion, often in a very direct and aggressive manner.

16.Theo Jackson, He/Him
I grew into my ‘queerness’ later in life, having spent many years repressing and ignoring it. This painting is reflective of that opening up and profound effect this had on my relationship to my own body – how I unlocked new ways of moving, dancing, having sex and a new feeling of simply existing in my body – previously inaccessible to me. The painting shows my own body, in a ‘pose’ that reflects this newfound physicality. It is meant to capture the sense of freedom and expression that I found throughout this process.

17.Katrina Lyne-Watt, She/Her
Flex
This piece reflects the unbashful nature of sexuality. Moulding the paint into three dimensional forms that protrude and dangle off the surface, revealing their visibility. Unashamed and all out there, revealing the beauty of the materials.

18.Roux Malherbe, They/Them
Venus as a boi
In a desire to paint from life, I paint a lot of self-portraits. The majority of my face – attempting to capture seismic changes in myself and my understanding of myself over the past two years, but also recently closely cropped nudes. This painting is one of a series of nude self-portraits I’m currently painting and developing. The nudity is quite ambiguously in your face; the hand obscuring, or penetrating or as my friend said, just having a good scratch.

19.Jaime Martinez Lopez, They/Them
Talk To Me – with audience
“Talk to me” is a yearlong Performance I started on the 1st January of 2024, I write a letter to myself every day with my eyes covered and send it to my home address until the 31st of December of 2024. This artwork is about self-discovery, introspection and the pass of time. I would like to adapt it for it to be written with the help of the audience. I would be asking members of the audience to cover my eyes with their hands and whispers in my ear whatever they want me to write and I will write it and send it to the address they tell me to send it to.

20.Eva Merendes, She/Her
The Splash
This watercolour painting works as a metaphor for embracing the world barefoot, vulnerable yet unbothered and unapologetically authentic. The way the foot steps onto the puddle while releasing playful splashes symbolizes fearless exploration, inviting the viewers to savour life’s unfiltered experiences. For this painting I got inspiration from David Hockney’s homonymous work.

21.Robbie McKinstry, He/Him
Midnight in Annecy
This work is a depiction of a memory, embracing my partner on a hot summer night on holiday. I use surreal imagery in an attempt to explain the contemplative thoughts that enter the mind when half asleep. The interior and exterior also blur together, the interior referencing the safety felt by safe spaces and exterior giving a sense of belonging to the natural world.

22.Efrat Merin, She/Her
Parting the Ocean
In the past three years I have been developing the sgraffito technique, in which parts of the surface are scratched and removed to expose the underlying layer. I use cold encaustic Cuní Paint, an ancient formula dating back to Greco-Roman antiquity. This is a technique which reveals rather than adds, an archaeological-like process that endows the paintings with a quality of discovery reflecting my work with historical-futuristic mythology.

23.Saffron Mustafa (Saf), She/They
Chat to me bi / under my bi umbrella
Chat to me bi/ under my bi umbrella emerged as I started to create a vision for a series of workshops about bisexuality and other adjacent sexualities under the bisexual umbrella and the notes, I made along the way which are simple and engaging. I am frustrated at the invisibility of bisexuals and want to increase conversations and awareness of the breadth of bisexual experiences.

24.Charlie Oppenheim, She/Her
Bim Bim
I made a series of ceramics, drawings and prints which were part of a process of thinking about/through gender and sex in order to find ways through social dynamics that sometimes feel closed and square, like an endless grid. The idea of phallic power… is this an illusion, a collective fantasy, something to be appropriated, something to be undermined, something to be revealed as empty or fragile or funny? I am interested in using visual and poetic forms to disrupt the binary concepts of male/female, heterosexual/ homosexual to make more liveable space. I etched and printed just the simple outline of the shape, and then years later, I created shades and textures and re-printed it. This is a phallic form, and yet it’s empty, penetrable and double. It exists in relation to another. It’s not clear if its a joke, a conversation, a sexual encounter or something serious like the individual and enclosed sense of loss, the loss of something that never was whole.

25.Alessandro Paiano, He/Him
Non vedo- Non sento-Non parlo
Sometimes people can’t see, other times they don’t want to see. Sometimes people can’t hear, other times they don’t want to hear. Sometimes people can’t speak, other times they don’t want to speak.

26.E.M. Parry, They/Them
Pricklings
Pricklings is a durational performance, in which viewer/participants are invited to stick pins into an ambiguously gendered silicone body-suit worn by the artist, staging themself as trans saint, queer icon, fetish object, witch’s poppet, a luck charm, a ritual, a process, a test, a game. Originally performed in queer club spaces Riposte and Dialogue, and more recently in gallery settings (including Prague Quadrennial international symposium of scenography, and Fix 23 Live Art Festival, Belfast, and TaPRA), the work blurs boundaries and troubles distinctions between performer/spectator/participant/object/ subject/body/costume/flesh/artefact/archive/ event. Pricklings explores trans embodiment and autonomy, tracking edges, slippages and entanglements across bodies, practices and communities. In a thickly-signifying moment of contact, connection and exchange, as pin penetrates surrogate flesh, religious, historical, medical and magical iconography are remixed and repurposed to create intimate spectacles and new rituals of becoming.

27.Sol Santana, They/Them
Between Selves
“Between Selves” is an embroidery on a piece of textile that displays two silhouettes each on one side of the brackets with the writing “Between Selves”. One of the silhouettes has a gem stone in the place of the heart, while the other has a shell. This piece explores the way in which brackets have somehow become part of my identity as a trans person with a given name and chosen name. Sol is the name that I have chosen to be called, but Igor is the name on my official papers. In order to clarify this circumstance, there was a necessity to put either one of these names between brackets. These brackets then became part of my name and also of my identity. This is a work in progress still.

28.Eva Sbaraini, She/Her
In Reverie with Trev Flash
In Reverie with Trev Flash is a portrait of Lewisham based queer musician, poet and LGBTQ+ homeless advocate Trev Flash. The artworks comprises of two images presented side by side. 1. Portrait of Trev Flash, Lewisham, 2023 – a digitally extracted and rendered scene from 3D scan data captured in Trev Flashs’ home, presented as a UV print on aluminium. 2. Commonplace Calm, 2023 – a digitally extracted and rendered scene from 3D scan data of Trev and their dog Chips, presented as a UV print on aluminium.

29.Harmeet Singh Rahal, He/Him
Multispeciality Clinic, Oshiwara
A photograph taken in Mumbai, of a worn-down advertisement for a multispeciality clinic. This photograph is then printed on two A3 sheets and wheat-pasted or stickered on the wall. In the photograph, we see clip-art stock imagery of eyes, mouths, obscure medical procedures and nuclear families, deconstructed and collaged together, in the amorphous after-life of the multispeciality clinic. With this piece, I’m interested in the poetics of collage, and the interaction between different layers of the image.

30.Artur Siudem, They/Them
London Trans+ Pride Archive Film
I used the clips that I filmed over the Trans+ Pride protests over 2021-23 to explore its affective impact on those who participate – that is, how it feels to be there as a queer person, and how does it compare to otherwise day-to-day queer existence in the “normal” world. I did it because each time I attended LTP I felt as if the time had stopped, and as if we were all suspended in a bubble of support and safety. However, this comfort bubble has its underbelly, as year after year I found myself protesting the very same things – the right to equal existence. The film is not a finished project but rather a sum-up of clips collected until now, and it will be continued in the years to come – I hope that by getting people to see it I can keep the project going with more people on board willing to participate. In the future, apart from documenting protests I also want to focus on exploring through film how it feels to exist in public space as a person that is out of the cisgender system, and how transphobia affects people’s behaviour in public/private and their perception of self. 

31.Siao-Chen Wang (Sam), He/Him
Flower
This is all intertwined with the essence of energy. In the dance of his brushstrokes, the unearthed tangible elements, crafting the image of a hand cradling blossoms. His deepest yearning is for every soul that gazes upon this painting to be touched by a sense of bliss. He endeavours to manifest the ethereal energy of love into a visible form.

32.Raffi Williamson, She/He/They
Hand Raised to the Heavens, Woman to Woman
This banner is about protection, collective, support and action; and explores historicity and facticity, through the queering of language, identity and historical narratives. The artwork is inspired by the figure of Boudica, exploring a mythologised moment before she rides into battle, and prays to the Celtic war goddess, Andraste, asking for protection. Using language as a speculative tool to explore the initial queerness of this moment, I wanted to question her identity, the way she is viewed within history, and reclaim her legacy as a neuroqueer, feminist symbol. As well as her story and name being reimagined and mistranslated by European, male historians and Medieval scribes; Boudica has also been mirrored and reclaimed by different powerful women in history (eg. Queen Elizabeth I, and Queen Victoria), becoming an imperialist symbol for the British Empire, despite being a figure who fought to oppose Roman colonisers. I am interested in how her story has changed, often through right-wing and colonialist propaganda, and what it might mean to reclaim her today from a neuro-gender-queer perspective, and how her story could be significant within current political landscapes. The making process of the banner itself is important to exploring these themes and narratives, through drawing on the complex and intersectional history of feminist banners.

33.Yufeng Wu, He/Him
Breathe
That unspeakable moment was like walking underwater,
beathing in and out,
seeing a personal illusion created in the absence of gravity, floating around,
clinging to my breath,
making me unable to say, as long as I was still walking,
it didn’t matter who I was.

34.Xinyu XuXX, She/It
The Room it Leaks
The Room it Leaks is a video installation composed of hazy landscapes, fragmented sound effects, and the interplay of light and texture, this “room” simultaneously alludes to a sanctuary and an emotional complex, encompassing Xinyu ‘s practices and growth stories as an East Asian queer woman. Its vitality derives from embodying identity issues, bearing the weight of trauma and violence while engaging in a sustaining, reparative construction. This work aims to use embodied imagery memories to interrupt between different time spaces, between human and non-human world, create a second-skin, a safe space for queerness.

35.Lianjiang Zhu, He/His
Wake up in a miracle
In the process of deep integration of digital technological tools into our daily lives, our distinction of the intrinsic properties of things is gradually becoming unclear. In an environment characterized by the rapid production of images and lower dissemination costs, vulnerabilities related to the misuse of technology in terms of identity and personal information security are gradually becoming apparent. Our ability to distinguish between the virtual and the real is progressively diminishing, with continuous technological breakthroughs being perceived as miraculous. Individual biological information can be manipulated and reshaped, leading to a so-called virtual persona, where individual information serves as fuel for technological processes and functions as raw material and an example. In moments when the boundaries between the virtual and the real are breached, and roles between individuals and data undergo a mutual exchange, how can individuals substantiate and articulate their positions?