COCONUT STUDIOS//2024
The Text Is Trans is a series of small framed works developed in the context of a trans group therapy program. Each work engages a term beginning with “trans,” pairing it with a definition that is technically incorrect yet conceptually suggestive. These gestures suspend meaning, holding language in a state of productive instability.
Across text, framing, and collage, the works ask how meaning is fixed, displaced, and reopened. The series approaches “trans” not only as a prefix or category, but as a condition of movement, passage, transformation, and semantic tension.
Documentation
Artwork images/installation documentation/detail images/lecture or event documentation if relevant.
Research Relation
Within the broader research, The Text Is Trans contributes to the project’s investigation of ambivalence, translation, and the instability of textual meaning. It stages language as something that can be held in suspension: still legible, but displaced enough to generate new relations and affects.
The work also extends the project’s concern with the politics of reading and naming, asking how language participates in identity, address, and the conditions under which bodies become readable.
QR Relation
Section: Methodologies & Methods
Chapter: Meeting the Meaning Halfway
Page: 42
Return to the document: This page documents the series discussed in relation to ambivalence, meaning, and the suspension of semantic closure.
STUDIO: 09.DEC.2025
This section documents the development of a digital movable-type process in which letters appear to be formed from melting, dripping, and reconstituted wax. The work translates the material language of letterpress into projected animation, allowing type to behave as if it were molten, unstable, and bodily.
Rather than treating letters as clean carriers of language, the process makes them viscous and excessive. The letterform becomes a surface event: something that pools, drips, burns, shines, and threatens to lose its legibility.
Documentation
Video tests/animation stills/process documentation.
Research Relation
This page supports the development of Ecce Homo and the project’s broader interest in writing with wax. It shows how digital projection can simulate a material process while still remaining tied to real material experiments in wax, stencil, print, and surface.
Within the research, the wax letterpress becomes a bridge between historical technologies of reproduction and the project’s recurring concern with inscription as a bodily, unstable, and surface-bound event.
QR Relation
Section: Part II: Praxis
Chapter: ECCE HOMO/Constructing a digital wax movable-type letterpress
Page: 154
Return to the document: This page offers process documentation connected to the construction of the digital wax letterpress.
NORTHERN CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART//2025
Ecce Homo (Behold the Homo) develops a digital wax movable-type letterpress through projection, animation, writing, and biblical citation. The work draws together scripture, authorship, mechanical reproduction, confession, and the wall as a site of inscription.
The title invokes both the biblical phrase “Behold the man” and Nietzsche’s autobiographical Ecce Homo, transforming the declaration into a queer, textual, and exegetical address: behold the homo, behold the text, behold the writing on the wall.
Documentation
Video/projection documentation/stills/installation images.
Research Relation
This work functions as a major synthesis point for Meeting the Text Halfway. It brings together exegesis as object and exegesis as method, treating writing not as explanation after the work, but as part of the work’s material and conceptual operation.
Within the project, Ecce Homo asks how writing appears through light, wax, wall, scripture, and citation. It stages the exegesis itself as something projected, inscribed, translated, and exposed.
QR Relation
Section: Part II: Praxis
Chapter: ECCE HOMO (Behold the Homo)
Page: 153
Return to the document: This page provides documentation of the moving-image and installation components of the work.