​​MY MOM IS A BODYBUILDER
​AND SO AM I

Charcoal on Strathmore drawing paper, 2023.

My Mom is a Bodybuilder and so am I is both practice and an experiment in using my own body as a subject. For the past three years, I have been creating lithographs of abstracted collaged bodies, often using charcoal drawings from artists like John Singer Sargent and Thomas Eakins. This practice was born out of my frustration in graduate school with the limitations of art historical queer readings. In all my prints, there is an undeniable sense of “other” that the forms hold, often understood as trans bodies without any explicit signaling. Having moved past the catharsis of creating these images long ago, I wanted to make a shift to a clearer trans narrative in my work, and using my own body as image source was the most direct method. These drawings are the beginnings of my exploration with my body as subject, while also thinking about the transness of my body and the experience of my gender transition. By pairing them with the body of my professional bodybuilder mom and the ways her body transitions, it feels simultaneously more lighthearted as well as more personal, taking a deep dive right at the start so it gets easier later on.