Trans Post Project Archive

Explore the Trans Post Project from 2021 and 2022, to see the community work and the artists we commisioned.

Trans Post Project 2022

These designs, submitted by participants in 2022, call for urgently needed change to trans healthcare and public opinion, offer words of support or simply share the results of a peaceful moment spent making. From dreaming of the basic safety to watch the stars at night, to asserting the cosmic nature of being trans in a universe that has always been fluid and changeable, these postcards send a common message towards a trans future; the simple guarantee of existing in it.

Attenborough Arts Centre would like to thank every artist that shared their design, as well as the youth groups, support circles and organisations that helped to facilitate this.

Image descriptions can be accessed by clicking on each image.

#TDOVpostcards

Meet the Artists 2022

We commissioned five artists to show us what Trans Futures means to them.

Ashton Attzs

Ashton Attzs

Ashton Attzs is a 23-year-old, UK-based painter and illustrator. Their bold and colourful designs celebrate what makes us who we are and seek to create joyful utopias that empower LGBTQ+ people and people of colour around the world. Attzs’ work has been commissioned by clients such as Adidas, Instagram and Comic Relief, and was awarded the Evening Standard Art Prize in 2018.

Instagram: @attzs_

Postcard title: ‘There Will Always Be Space’

Image Description: Digital illustration. Two astronaut close their eyes peacefully in front of a pink and blue gradient space-scape. One stands on the left in a pink space suite with a trans symbol on the back. They have brown skin, short pink locks and a grey beard. The other sits on the right, they wear a white space suite with an intersex symbol on the back. They have pale skin and wear a pink cap. In the background we see a large ringed planet with a trans flag planted in it, a flying saucer beams up a person, a rocket flies by and a space age building peek out from behind the low clouds.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is an artist living and working in London. She creates work that seeks to archive black trans experience:  “I use technology to imagine our lives in environments that centre our bodies… Those living, those that have passed and those that have been forgotten”. They have recently held interactive solo exhibitions at Quad Derby and Arebyte Gallery.

Instagram: @Ladydangfua

Postcard title: ‘WE CANT DO THIS ALONE’

Image Description: Digital rendering collage. Text reads ‘WE CANT DO THIS ALONE’ in an X-ray colour scheme. A scene like a video game landscape shows a forest clearing. A figure with a glowing outline stands in the middle. They have a dark purple face and wear a metallic durag with a tunic in molten patterns of red, green and yellow.  All-black figures covered in bands of small white writing reading ‘black trans’ lean on each other just behind. Beyond this, a brightly glowing figure floats with arms stretched out to each side, in front of three box shapes with distorted faces, leaning out of glowing yellow portals. Crowds of replicated figures gather in various locations around this, with many walking towards us. A rendering of a hand reaches out from the viewer’s perspective.

Claye Bowler

Claye Bowler

Claye Bowler (b.1995) is an artist based in Huddersfield. His work explores queer and trans narratives and how they have been perpetually hidden, erased or destroyed. Bowler uses sculpture and performance to subvert these practices in his own work as well as creating space to showcase and support other queer and trans artists. Claye has recently exhibited as part of Queer Contemporaries and UKNA city takeover at Attenborough Arts Centre and is a member of YSI Sculpture Network.

Instagram: @clayebowler

Postcard title: ‘Chockablock Trans Archive’

Image Description: A paper collage shows a shelf frame packed with storage boxes, packages, paper stacks and files. There’s the suggestion that one translucent box might contain breast tissue, whilst another case holds a series of vials. The colour scheme is mainly cardboard brown with green and yellow highlights on a light blue background.

Henry Dow

Henry Dow

Henry Dow is a trans, working class, disabled artist, writer and activist. “My work is autobiographical and mainly about my experience living with overlapping marginalised identities. I make illustrations, data art, word collages and design crochet. I’ve made art for years, but the last decade I’ve been disabled, art has become my most valuable, and sometimes only, means of communication. especially my word collages, I sometimes used a label maker to communicate with when non verbal, before I had text to speech tech, and diagrams, to explain where multiply disabled/chronically ill people, slip through the cracks of the healthcare system.”

Instagram: @frocktopus

Postcard title: ‘Trans Elders Are Living Your Future Now’

Image Description: Text reads ‘Trans people of all ages have existed through all ages’. In the same muted colour scheme of purples, greens and oranges, 5 dappled strips of granulated paint start in the bottom left corner, twist together in the middle and spread back out into the top right corner. The background looks like lilac watercolour.

Mika

Mika

Mika is a trans femme non-binary artist living in London, working on creative, out of this world, queer black artwork. They are 24-years-old and spent 2020 protesting, taking part in model campaigns and eventually being signed in 2021. They are a mental health advocate who openly expresses their world in their art.

Instagram: @mikachuu_3

Postcard title: ‘My Trans Future is Black’

Image Description: Digital illustration. A figure with dark purple skin, torso view. They hold one hand upright, parallel with their face whilst the back of the other hand faces towards us, horizontal.  Their eyes glow white and their lips are slightly parted. They have a long, thin, black moustache and eyelashes that flow behind them. Two strands of hair fall in symmetrical pink and blue waves, with yellow buns or spheres around the crown of their head. They appear to emerge from a yellow glow, surrounded by a wavy purple haze with flowing white line etched through it.

Workshops were facilitated by zine maker and binary breaker Melody Sproates, queer-feminist theatre maker Octavia Nyombi and Trans Post Project curator Morel O’Sullivan.

Virtual Gallery Space

The Gallery above is part of an investigation into future digital exhibitions and how people can use them. As such, the virtual gallery space is not as accessible as we would wish and is not a finished experience.

All the content in this virtual space is visible in the media table above.

Meet the Artists

A landscape postcard split into two section, surrounded by a green boarder. The left-hand section is dappled black with one green circle in the middle. The right-hand section is an explosion of rainbow paint colours, radiating form the center.

Henry Dow

He/Him

‘I’m a Trans, Working-class, Disabled artist, activist and illustrator, I make autobiographical data art, word collages, diagrams, textiles, mixed media pieces and paintings about my overlapping marginalised identities and experiences.’

Instagram: @frocktopus

Postcard title: Shrink/Expand

A yellow portrait postcard shows two figures, back to back. They have their hands to their mouths as if calling or shouting. The one on the left is blue with pink hair and the one on the right is pink with blue hair. Their hair is long with a voluminous fringe, almost forming a heart-shape together, and they each have a set of horns in nonbinary flag colours. They have shining cheekbones, lips and nose, freckles, dark eye make-up, a slight moustache and a trans symbol tattoo on their shoulders.

Mika

She/They

Mika (She/They) is a 23 year old black and trans artist from London. They make artwork focusing on queer and trans POC experiences. Embracing the melanin and transness and queerness as one beautiful moment in their artistry.

“It’s about embracing colours of trans experience mainly my own. As a black and trans individual you never know how much impact you can have all the time a midst all of the problems within this world. But , my artwork is my biggest form of impacting people. This piece is about breaking free from gender norms and feeling empowered.”

Instagram: @_editmyfengshui_

Postcard title: Punk up my Pride

A photo of an artist’s desk shows two postcard designs on blue card. The one on the left is a portrait collage of three flower vases in the rain, saying ‘I care about you’. The one on the right is landscape and reads ‘you are not alone’, with all the Os connected to a web of silver circles surrounding the words. In the background is a purple sheet of paper on a green cutting board, surrounded by pens, Soofiya’s rainbow business cards and yellow post-it-notes

Soofiya

Soofiya’s design practice centres around illustration, visual identity and book design. Soofiya‘s art practice and writings aim to articulate a commentary on gender, race, politics and bodies through a DIY and therapeutically informed approach.

Instagram: @soofiya

Postcard template tutorial by Soofiya