COMING SOON...
Thank you, Boots - An ode to my friends (2026)
The final project consists of a large oil pastel drawing (120 × 90 cm), now completed, accompanied by four essays (or perhaps four letters) which I am currently writing.
The letters reflect on emotional abuse, friendship, care, and recovery. They will be handbound into a small book to be exhibited alongside the drawing of the boots. I hope the essays will also find a life elsewhere through publication.
Thank you, Boots – An ode to my Friends began with making cards for those who helped me stand tall again after having been made small.
I wanted to draw the boots at a larger-than-life scale, so that the absent body wearing them is implied through exaggeration: a body made monumental through care, communal support, and processes of unlearning; the dismantling of inherited patriarchal values through political and intellectual engagement, the critical undoing of internalised assumptions imposed by others, as well as the insistence on existing as queerly and fully as possible. The scale of the drawing became a way of articulating endurance, solidarity, and the reconstruction of selfhood.
