This Body Was Carved From Stone (2023-ongoing) depicts my lived experience as a transgender man. In my imagery, I visualise both the negatives and the positives of my experience: the distress of a gender non-conforming childhood and mis-matched puberty, but also the ensuing joy of defining myself for myself. Years of introspection and exploration have led me to develop a fluid and deeply complex relationship with gender. To me, it is both an act of performance and an anchor of my identity. Through my photographic self-portraiture, I carve a space for myself within a hostile sociopolitical landscape that rejects my existence. I use the camera to illustrate how my emotions shift in time with my body’s changes, and the gentle euphoria of remaking myself in my own image.

I am a man when I am watched. Alone, a body is all that remains.

I am a man when I part my lips and speak; I am a man when I wrestle with my brother; I sit amongst men, we share a drink, and we share this drink because I am one of them.

But when I am in no other company but my own – sharing the wind with the bright whispers of a yew tree, or walking alongside the silt-stirring silver rhythm of a creek – it is here that I am a body, and I am tender, and I am alone.