For the past year I have been meditating on the term “transintimacy.” Under the guidance of this term and through my transgender subjectivity, I am developing material explorations and
a theoretical framework to explore forms of intimacy and embodiment that breech the separation between attraction and repulsion, beauty and abjection, genesis and death. Drawing from visual
references in non-mammal entities like mollusks, corals, and seed pods, as well as epidermoid cysts and other skin ailments that generate abject material, I create silicone objects meant to be
touched and handled by the viewer. Other organic or faux-organic matter is suspended at the surface of some of these objects, and I fill their various pores and orifices with slimy fluids or
pods that can be squeezed or popped out. This work so far has facilitated encounters which begin with a viewer’s attraction to an art object with the possibility of direct contact, and then morph
into repulsion upon closer inspection. The animacy and agency of these objects is always in question. Ultimately, I am obliquely alluding to an encounter with the queer and trans body,
bodies whose enfleshment, movement, reproduction, and very existence are inscrutable within a cis-hetero lens of embodiment.