A Garden Beneath the Skin (2026)

A Garden Beneath the Skin, created by me using acrylic paint across three wooden panels with pastel colour, calendula and hyacinth flowers, and silver marking sites of physical change. This piece captures a trans man's body as both fractured and whole, inspired by my own transition and the "Protect the Dolls" movement against transphobic violence.

The colour sits in largely flat, unmodulated fields, the lilac background, the pale skin, rather than gradated tone, giving the surface a clean, poster-like quality throughout. Against that flatness, the exposed ribcage and spine in the middle panel are rendered with careful structural accuracy, teal and mint toned rather than naturalistic bone colour, so the anatomy stays illustrative while still folding into the piece's stylised palette.

I used the softness of pastel acrylic to hold onto my own femininity while exploring what it means to be a trans man. Those two things aren't in conflict for me, whatever anyone tells you. The piece sits across three separate wooden panels, which reflects both the boundaries I've crossed and society's attempts to slot me into fixed categories. The panels divide the surface, but the imagery and symbolism move across them anyway, because identity doesn't stay where it's told to. I exist beyond the lines drawn around me. The structures built to categorise me fail, every time.

The flowers are calendula, for healing, and hyacinth, for new beginnings, hope, resilience. They grow behind and through my skeletal ribs as if my inner work and transformation are being made visible. They're also a promise to myself: even after I die, I'll still have been a man, no matter what anyone decides to remember or misremember.

The silver marks the places on my body that have changed through transition. I chose it partly for what it does visually, and partly for what it's meant across history: transformation, alchemy, something just outside the ordinary.

I painted my body as a doll on purpose, referencing the "Protect the Dolls" slogans tied to opposition against transphobic violence toward trans women and transfeminine people. But I wanted this piece to hold space for something quieter too, the way trans men and transmasculine people can become silent victims of that same misogyny, just less visibly. As a trans man, I live inside the tension between femininity, identity, and a world that still can't stop looking at bodies it associates with womanhood and deciding it has a right to them.

The doll joints are also a nod to Hans Bellmer's Doll series, a series of work that's been read for decades through a feminist lens, about how a feminised body gets treated as something to be arranged, controlled, and handled rather than heard. That's the same misogyny trans men and transmasculine people run into, especially when our bodies get filtered through someone else's idea of femininity first.

I built this piece out of gender, transition, mortality, and the fight over who gets to interpret a body. In the end, it's simple: I'm a trans man. I'm human, whatever the gaze of society or history says. Across three panels, I refuse to be divided, contained, or defined. I keep crossing the lines anyway.