The body of a transgender person exists as a liminal space. Though this feeling of liminality feels omnipresent, elemental, inescapable to me, I was surprised when I consulted the Oxford English Dictionary to find that it was actually quite new. The earliest use of Limen was in 1824, where Herbart, a psychologist, used it to describe “the minimum amount of stimulus or nerve-excitation required to produce a sensation.” Or, more clearly, he means that less than the liminal amount, nothing happens, and that beyond that amount is what we can study, know, and use. This definition, this early definition, is about liminality in the body. It wasn’t until the early 1900’s that the use of liminality came much closer to the way it is used today, mainly to describe the anthropological subject in the middle of ritual; where the old self has died, and the new self, the post ritual self, has not yet been initiated. I believe, in order to understand my work, my position, my direction, one must understand liminality, especially as it relates to the transgender person, and more specifically, to nonbinary individuals such as myself, who live in the threshold between the old order and the new, the known and the unknown, the dead and the living.

As this liminality is mapped on to me by every cis person I encounter I find myself compelled to depict the trans body in its many iterations, compelled to try in my work to consolidate a singular meaning. I find myself failing, failing over again, and only in that failure finding the truth I was looking for—in color, in perspective, in shock, in multiplicity. Maybe through this attempt at representation I can fix or alter all the failures of representation that came before. Not only in art but in life, so cis people might know what trans people have known all along; you cannot look at something and know what it is. You cannot depend on what you’ve been told in order to see. You have to look, and look again, and fail in how you thought you should look. You have to fail in ways that will change you.

I want people to understand because I did not first understand. People need to understand because they would not let me understand. I was in middle school when I came out. Early, by most accounts. It was too much for me to be a gay, afab person. I was thrown out. I was beaten. I was not let into friend’s homes. I subsisted. A couple years later I came out as transgender. Not a girl but not a man. I expected the people around me then, queer or allies by their own confession, to open their arms. They said you’re confused; pick one. And I did. And I was made to understand. Made to understand that people around me had accepted what they’d been told; that there are two genders and those genders are based on biology. That queerness happened but it should be snuffed out when at all possible. That people could only love me, could only see me, in manageable prepackaged pieces. I learned, as time went on, that I could only hope for this to change through art.

I’ve been making art longer than I can remember, and probably before I can remember. I don’t remember my childhood very well. I know I loved working with charcoal. I know I loved the collision of the mind and the hand on paper. I know it was a reprieve, from the abuse of my biological mother, who supported the practice, and the indifference of my grandmother, who had been trying, idly, to be an artist her entire life. The confrontational, blunt aspects of my art, which were present even then, didn’t have a concrete focus. The works concerned bodies, concerned family, concerned god, but they lacked a unifying thread. They were not sure of their own importance. They tried to be interesting. They wanted to bite.

When I came out, first as gay and then as trans, my identity began to coalesce. The work I made from then on had stakes. It was not concerned with being merely interesting, it instead asked, how can the images I create investigate the nuances, the misunderstandings, and the trauma associated with being a queer and nonbinary person in the Midwest? How can different mediums confront the dizzying opposition of violence and passivity from people in my everyday life? How can what I make force people to see me, and people like me, more clearly?

These questions developed as my experience developed, as time did its work of erosion and accumulation. For years I tried to make ceramics. Nothing was calmer and more exciting than clay on my palms and the tips of my fingers. But what I made was nothing like what I envisioned. Things broke. I was exasperated. At around sixteen I discovered printmaking. The first prints I made were five-layer reduction blocks. A print of mine won Director’s Choice at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp. And though I don’t think that printmaking is my best or favorite medium, it suited me. I understood chemicals and chemistry. I liked that much of printmaking intersected with Punk and DIY movements where queerness was more accepted and more present. Up until that time, I had avoided painting because of the bourgeois snobbery I associated with the art form. And might have continued to avoid it, if not for a fluke of scheduling and chance. I took a painting class my sophomore year, stubbornly, with resistance. It was the only class that fit into my schedule and fulfilled a studio credit. I fell in love. In love with color, with speed, with mixing and layering. With bringing my queerness into my body into a medium that had previously eschewed it. Now I combine my expertise in painting and printmaking with digital fabrication. I don’t imagine this will be the end in my experimentation with mediums. In fact, I hope not.

My experience is tied with my work and cannot be severed from it. It would be like cutting the heart from the body and asking it to run. The goals I have for my work are multiple, and plenty, but more than anything else, more than representing queer and trans bodies in order to open the possibilities of the art world, I hope for one person, many people, to leave a series of mine and see me, and see themselves, in a way that the world doesn’t currently allow or foster. For me, day in and day out, it is the only work to do.