Rhiannon Lowe

Artist Statement

"Man, I can’t tell you how relieved I was when you took off your dress, you didn’t have a dick", 2021/22, mixed media

"Man, I can’t tell you how relieved I was when you took off your dress, you didn’t have a dick” says Clarence to Alabama in True Romance, as they sit high up, in front of the huge JMC truck billboard. Clarence’s post-sex relief is obvious; less so to most is the passing slap in the face of anyone watching who just might be trans or non-binary. Aw the early ‘90s. I still love and still hate that film. Some things in the world have changed; a great deal hasn’t.

This is a collection of reworked pieces, objects and ephemera from Cekca Het: Trans Panic, my recent exhibitions and performances based around a never-to-make-it noise band project. Cekca Het: Trans Panic celebrates and explores my identity pre-, during and post transition, through a mix of text, installation, moving image, sound, costume and performance. The work collapses my past and present, seeks domestic escape from medical horrors and social fears, considers my wriggles for position within trans spaces and art communities, and takes swipes at transphobic individuals and media.

The work was at at Freelands Foundation as part of their artist programme's cohort 2's show, and came out of my ongoing project and show Cekca Het: Trans Panic which showed at Mission Gallery, and @g39, Cardiff, as part of No Time To Plan An Ending (also including Becca & Clare, Freya Dooley, Rebecca Gould Will Roberts, Neasa Terry), in 2021

Cekca Het: Trans Panic is me, me then and now. It’s a mess of noise and memory, hope and fear; it’s a paene to the long lost and a statement of intent; it’s an exploration of secrecy and a lived life; it’s a search for a safe place within the hard wild reality of being trans.

The following is a text edit from Trans Panic magazine, produced as part of the exhibition at Mission Gallery, Swansea in 2021. 

I'm caught between different states, officially: born and created in one, with time, experience, life, loves, people, messages, communications, paperwork to match (in the eyes of others); and living in another, one that I have been dreaming of, manufacturing and living for as many years as I can remember, to (re)make myself anew. I now have yet more proofs of who I am and will be; proofs on paper and trails online, proofs in stone, written, drawn, recorded; official statements in full. I have the beginnings of another whole lived life.
This is another new year. I'm about 11 in new years; I am coming to that time when in my earlier life I like to think I made myself; me, my heart, my fears, my wants and desires, my places and loves, my confusions. It was the '80s; I was sneaking Smash Hits and Melody Maker under the covers, figuring the closest I'd get to being a woman was Martin L Gore, ffs.

The work has been made during 2020/21, while based at g39, Cardiff on a Freelands Foundation fellowship, and developed from work supported by a grant from Arts Council Wales.

For a look around my studio go here. This virtual studio tour was commissioned by Freelands Foundation and scanned and produced by The Net Gallery.