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The Yellow Steps
The Yellow Steps navigates with notions of visibility and change; primarily how the construct of gender is determined by what is visible. The work is a conceit for the way in which the trans body acts in opposition to this trope and moreover, as a site of cultural resistance. The project is a collaboration between myself and Mika, a trans boy, allowing him to build and actively participate in a narrative of his own construction. The title of the project is derived from Mika’s poem The Yellow Steps, which describes a piece of architecture that at once unsettled him but also offered an escape from his troubled homelife growing up. Architecture is used throughout to echo this sense of construction, the constant shrouding alluding to the underlying transition beneath. The work is a construct of measured realisation; beginning initially with the hidden, before a gradual advance towards revelation. For some trans people the desire to ‘pass’ in society is born of necessity, however for others, like Mika, there is a refusal to conform to this binary. The Yellow Steps centres on this dichotomy; the Foucauldian theory of power amassed via surveillance, in particular on and over architectural spaces and the body. The work therefore explores visibility and its relationship with power. |
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Plaudits for the Project;
Having been short-listed as a finalist for the PhMuseum's Women Photographers Grant, the work will be exhibited as part of the 2020 Vogue Italia Photovogue Festival in Milan from the 19th November.
https://photovoguefestival.vogue.it/en/video-exhibition/projections/finalists-or-phmuseum-2020-women-photographers-grant
Shortlisted for the PhMuseum Women Photographers Grant
https://phmuseum.com/grants/shortlisted/25747/
Source Magazine- Special Selection by Elizabeth Renstrom / The New Yorker
https://www.source.ie/graduate/2020/selection3_ma.php/
Photograd- Highly Commended
https://www.photograd.co.uk/2020-graduates/2020/8/3/xanthe-ellis-the-yellow-steps
The series was also recently acquired by The Arts Council during exhibition at Belfast Exposed and
will be held in their permanent collection.
Press for the Project;
Source Magazine Feature
https://www.source.ie/graduate/2020/ulstunimfa/ulstunimfa_student_17_40_21_06-08-20/ulstunimfa_student_17_40_21_06-08-20.php
https://reader.exacteditions.com/issues/90009/spread/1
Irish Arts Review
https://www.irishartsreview.com/new-generation-artist-work/xanthe-hutchinson/
Ph Museum Feature
https://phmuseum.com/xhutchinson/story/the-yellow-steps-03ee55d561
LFI
https://lfi-online.de/ceemes/en/news/belfast-exposed-1006704.html
Belfast Exposed
https://www.belfastexposed.org/digital/portfolios/xanthe-hutchinson/
Photofringe
https://2020.photofringe.org/exhibitions/navigation-1/view
BOYS DON'T CRY 2021- ongoing
For this project I explore the liminality both of adolescence and the trans body.
Increasingly, we have as a society begun to shift our understanding of gender. The trans body typifies change but is at odds with it in equal measure; the paradox of being in a state of constant flux.
In response to this, the series visually examines a conscious departure from binaries and the idea of inhabiting the liminal spaces between. The duality of light and dark, good and evil, male and female, nature and artifice is unpicked but most of all our sense of right and wrong.
The series imparts a microcosmic view of trans embodiment. It presents the viewer with a multiplicity of gazes and asks them to choose their own way of seeing.
I chose to photograph my 15 year old trans son as a way of processing these seismic shifts, the photographs represent not only his statelessness in the face of this process but my own too.
Increasingly, we have as a society begun to shift our understanding of gender. The trans body typifies change but is at odds with it in equal measure; the paradox of being in a state of constant flux.
In response to this, the series visually examines a conscious departure from binaries and the idea of inhabiting the liminal spaces between. The duality of light and dark, good and evil, male and female, nature and artifice is unpicked but most of all our sense of right and wrong.
The series imparts a microcosmic view of trans embodiment. It presents the viewer with a multiplicity of gazes and asks them to choose their own way of seeing.
I chose to photograph my 15 year old trans son as a way of processing these seismic shifts, the photographs represent not only his statelessness in the face of this process but my own too.
i-D Magazine
Read the article;i-d.vice.com/en/article/pkaymn/xanthe-hutchinson-photography
Praise for the project so far;
As part of the next edition of the PhotoVogue Festival (Milan, 17-20 of November 2022), we have decided to create a video installation which will feature a slideshow of the 100 artists that, among the 3.000 participants, we feel represent the most exciting group of fashion visual makers in the world today.
PhotoVogue Fashion 100 official selection, to be exhibited at the PhotoVogue Festival 2022.
https://www.vogue.com/article/meet-the-photovogue-fashion-100/
Juried exhibitor at the Preus Museum Photography Festival 2022
Juried Exhibitor at Photo Open Up Festival, Padua, Italy. 2022
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