tuck, twist, twink:
A body of self-portrait work
This body of work positions self-portraiture as a method of reorientation, a way of looking both inward and outward to question how the body is seen, read, and controlled.
Working through performance and image-making processes, I approach masculinity not as a fixed identity, but as something continuously constructed, negotiated, and performed.
The body becomes both subject and site. A place where visibility, vulnerability, and control intersect.
about the work
tuck, twist, twink unfolds as an exploration of how gender is performed, disciplined, and reimagined through visual culture.
Drawing from lived experience, the work traces encounters across public and private spaces like restrooms, archives, men’s artistic gymnastics, and landscapes - where the body is both observed and regulated. These environments, appearances, and movements become coded systems, shaping how identity is perceived and contained.
Therefore self-portraiture becomes a tool for interruption. By turning the camera onto myself, I reclaim authorship over the image, the gaze, and complicate the systems that attempt to define it.
Rather than offering a resolution, the work embraces instability, allowing identity to remain fluid, fragmented, and in process.
Hair, 2024
Photographic series
Held in the idea of me, 2025
Image transfer on mirrors
Issue 11: Bodies Without Permission
by ANARKISS
Exhibit B
An group art exhibition with a purpose presented by Peter Clarke Art Centre
on process
The making for me is not separate from meaning. Each image emerges through repetition, and testing - moving between control and release, precision and uncertainty. Photography extends beyond the frame, becoming tactile, performative, and spatial.
Images are folded, projected, transferred, and installed. The photograph is no longer fixed, it shifts, responds, and occupies space.
Through the process of making, the body is not simply represented, but continuously reconstructed.
Home projection, 2025
Projection photographic series
Gay(ze), 2025
Projection photographic series
2nd Place (Mirror Study Series I-V), 2025
Digitally manipulated image transfer on mirror
Exhibit B
A group art exhibition with a purpose presented by Peter Clarke Art Centre
Demon twink (Cruising altitude), 2025
Self-portrait, digital photograph
on the body / archive
The body carries its own archive. Histories of discipline, movement, and expectation are embedded within gesture, shaped over time through structures such as sport, education, and social surveillance.
With nearly 10 years of men’s artistic gymnastics training, multiple national colours and accolades, this legacy carries a hypermasculine residue that has shaped much of my identity before I even hit puberty. It becomes a site of return and reflection, where I confront a perceived version of myself that no longer exists.
By revisiting and re-performing what once was, I engage the archive not as a static record, but as something that can be disrupted, softened, and reimagined.
What once enforced conformity becomes material for transformation.
Masculinities in transit, 2025
Photographic series
Outopie (Father figure), 2025
Self-portrait, ink print on paper
Zali (Mother figure), 2025
Self-portrait, ink print on paper
Issue 1 - Reine
by Numen of Story
on landscape / return
Returning to the desert becomes a return to origin. The Namib Desert, a few kilometers away from home within the openness of the landscape, the body shifts, becoming smaller, more exposed, yet more grounded.
Allowing for this environment to enter the narrative the work moves away from the contained and constructed spaces of society, leaning more into a body and identity that is allowed to be present, held and more expansive.
It’s a me, myself, and I moment - negotiating between memory, place, and becoming.
Dismount, 2025
Typology of screengrabs
Standing scale, 2025
Digitally manipulated film photograph.
the plinth
The plinth, historically a structure of elevation and control, is recontextualised within this body of work. Traditionally used to uphold idealised forms of masculinity, it becomes a site of interruption, entangled with the body rather than separate from it.
By placing my own body in relation to this structure, the work challenges what is considered worthy of display. The plinth no longer stabilises meaning. Instead, the body and image interact with it in a destabilised way, echoing daily encounters with heteronormative structures.
From restroom policing to the oversexualisation of femme-presenting bodies, the work reflects how normativity continues to shape and restrict the most basic conditions of existence.
Miss-gender (Plinth study I), 2024
Self-portrait, ink print on plinth
Glorification (Plinth study II), 2025
Frameless double-sided self-portrait, plinth, ink print
Issue 1 - Reine
by Numen of Story
on going
This work does not seek to define the body. It opens space for it to remain unresolved, shifting between certainty and ambiguity. What emerges is not a fixed identity, but a continuous process of becoming. I am not interested in representation, but in curiosity unfolding in ways that are both respectful and meaningful.
There is beauty in being different.
