| Project Title | FIX YOUR HEARTS OR DIE |
| Location | Arts Depot, London, UK |
| Dates | July 2025 |
Contextual Statement
FIX YOUR HEARTS OR DIE explores the exploitation of the transgender body, challenging preconceptions about transness and how a strict gender binary can be repressive and harmful. David Lynch and Mike Frost’s Twin Peaks was a reference point due to its unabashed embrace of transgender people, the project taking its name from a quote from character Gordon Cole; “And when you became Denise, I told all your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die.”.
The work focuses on the exploration and politicisation of trans bodies and their depiction as forms of liberation and sources of fear mongering. There are references to peep shows and voting booths, playing on the idea that transgender bodies are often reduced to dehumanisation and medicalisation for political point-scoring, such as scapegoating transgender women for violence against cisgender women.
Combined practices, tied to masculine and feminine stereotypes, have been used to create obstruction, encouraging further engagement with the depicted body by looking past boundaries which twist and erase it. A simplified body is shown in monochrome, referencing the nuance and ‘grey areas’ of gender identity opposed to ‘black and white’ ideology. Working with abstraction in a queer context tackles the question raised by artist Gordon Hall in ‘Object Lessons: Thinking Gender Variance through Minimalist Sculpture’:
If it is possible to learn from objects how to see bodies differently, can they teach us to see gender differently, to shift the ways we perceive nonnormative genders?
Through abstraction of paintings using crochet panels perception of the trans body is challenged, requiring proactiveness on the viewer’s part for a more accurate interaction. This idea is described in Professor of Art History David Getsy’s 2019 essay, ‘Ten Queer Theses on Abstraction’;
‘[…] abstraction makes room for a different kind of sedition against the imposition of normativity.’, ‘[…] abstraction stages relationships amongst forms and their contexts allowing us to see differently the ways in which these relationships can unfold. That is, abstraction is about relations and the queer investment in abstraction can be a way to allegorize social relations through a playing out of formal relations.’
Artist inspiration includes Keith Haring’s use of flat shapes, colours and discussions of a lack of care received by queer people during the AIDS crisis, alongside Jenny Saville’s bold, confronting and often harshly realistic depictions of the body, forcing viewers to interact and feel seen. Further inspirations are Mona Hatoum’s Corps Étranger, giving an endoscopic internal view of the body, featuring a portal-like view and inescapable imagery and Izzy Treyvaud’s lino prints for the Trans Awareness Week Online Art Exhibition, using shape and line to form images of trans people to increase representational diversity, depicting figures without censorship or binary implications.
This project featured collaboration with photographer Ellis Knibbs for documentation. Working with Knibbs was based on their own relationship to queerness and our preexisting professional relationship, enabling clear communication and effective cooperation. It was displayed at artsdepot, London, for a varied viewership plus by zine and online for sustainability after exhibition dates.
Special Thanks
Thank you to Ellis Knibbs and Arts Depot, London
Project Documentation
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