Lucifex

I make bodies out of the materials we use to cover bodies, and the two materials disagree about what a body is.

Latex moulds to whoever is inside it. It takes every contour exactly, with a surface that is polished and perfect, and the moment the body leaves it gives all of that up. It has no memory. Leather is the opposite. It is skin that belonged to someone else, rough and scarred and uneven, and once it has been wet-moulded and worked it holds that shape for decades, long after the body it was shaped on has gone. One material is all present tense. The other is all memory.

That contrast is the whole practice. Gender, body image, fashion and sexuality each live somewhere between those two skins: the flawless surface that only exists while you are performing it, and the rough one that keeps the shape of what was done to it. Most of my pieces put the two materials in the same object and let them argue.

My practice is queer in its subject and in its method. The subject is the body under pressure: measured, bound, flattened, dressed, misread. The method is tailoring turned against itself. I take patterns from real people, mine and others', and then refuse to make the garment that pattern implies. Seams stay open. Hardware holds together halves that don't match. Pieces are cast on one body and shown on none.

I am not interested in shock. The work is slow and the craft is meant to be visible: saddle stitching, hand-cut edges left raw, latex seams glued and then polished until the joins vanish. Care is the argument. A body that has been handled this carefully is hard to dismiss.

Latex is the body while you are in it. Leather is what the body leaves behind.

The pieces sit between the dress form and the figure. Some are wearable and have been worn. Some are built to the exact measurements of a person and cannot be entered at all. I want the viewer to feel both at once: this could be mine, and this was never for me.

Lucifex is Elle Berman, a trans woman making sculpture in leather and latex in Dublin.

The work comes out of what it is like to be queer and trans and finding it hard. Not hard in the abstract: hard in the fitting room, on the measuring tape, in the garment that was made for a body that isn't yours, in the body that keeps changing and the clothes that don't. The sculptures are a way of taking those moments and making them into objects that can be looked at steadily, handled with care and shown to other people.

The struggle is only half of it. Alongside the sculpture, Elle makes garments in leather, latex and cloth that are meant to be worn, and that celebrate queer bodies as they are: cut to the person in front of her rather than to a standard block, and made to be seen in. The sculptures hold the difficulty still so it can be looked at. The garments are what happens when the fitting goes right.

Leather and latex were a deliberate choice. They are the two materials queer culture has used for a century to dress bodies that refuse to be dressed the usual way, and they behave in opposite ways: one takes the body perfectly and forgets it, the other is rough and keeps whatever shape it was given. That turned out to be a good description of transition, so the materials became the subject as well as the medium.

The practice is slow and hand-made. Everything is cut, stitched, moulded and glued by Elle in the studio, and the pieces are meant to show the time that went into them. Lineup, one latex cast a year for seven years, is the long project everything else sits around.

Fashion already does the thing sculpture claims to do: it decides what a body is allowed to look like, then manufactures that body at scale. I want to work at the point where the garment and the figure become the same object, and ask who drew the pattern.

Over the next few years the work moves in three directions. First, scale: freestanding figures at and above life size, built from multiple people's measurements so no single body is being represented. Second, time: Lineup, one cast of my own body a year for seven years, so that transition, ageing, weight and surgery appear as a series rather than a before and after. Third, the wearable work moves out of the gallery and onto bodies at events, documented and brought back as objects that have been used.

The aim is a body of work where fetish materials are not a provocation but a vocabulary. Leather and latex have carried queer desire, discipline and self-invention for a century. I want the sculptures to speak that vocabulary fluently and to say something new in it about gender and about being looked at.

Rough and smooth is not only a difference in material. It is the difference between a surface that shows its history and one that refuses to.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in Touching Feeling, draws on Renu Bora's distinction between texture and texxture: the second spelling is for a surface that carries the visible record of how it was made and handled, the first for a surface so smooth that its making is hidden. Leather is texxture. Every scar, brand and stretch mark on the hide is a record of a life, and every tool mark I add joins it. Latex is texture in Sedgwick's first sense: a polished surface with no past, which is exactly why it reads as perfect. The pieces hold the two together so the viewer can feel what each one conceals.

Judith Butler's account of gender as a "stylized repetition of acts" with no original behind it is the other foundation. Latex is performativity made literal. It is a flawless gendered surface that exists only while a body is inside it performing, and that collapses into a formless heap the moment the performance stops. There is no latex body underneath the latex. Leather is what Butler calls sedimentation: repetition that has hardened over time into something that feels natural and permanent. Wet-moulded hide keeps a shape for decades because it was held in that shape long enough. So does a body.

There is no latex body underneath the latex.

Jack Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure gives the work permission to refuse the finished garment. The corset that never closes, the latex jacket that fails to hold the chest, the torso whose two halves don't fit: in a tailoring workshop each of these is a defect. Here failure to resolve into a legible, finished body is the point. Halberstam's "queer time" is in the seven-cast series too, which refuses the before-and-after story that transition and ageing are usually told through.

José Esteban Muñoz wrote that queerness "is not yet here", a horizon rather than a possession. The latex pieces are built in that tense. A cast taken from the living body is perfect for the length of the sitting and then it is gone, and what is left on the rail is the evidence that it was possible. Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology describes queerness as bodies and objects that fail to line up with the orientations they are given. A seam that joins two halves that were never meant to meet, held by hardware, is that failure made into a structure that stands.

The materials also carry their own queer history and I use it deliberately. Michel Foucault, speaking about leather and S/M culture in the early 1980s, described it not as the uncovering of hidden desires but as the invention of new possibilities for pleasure through the strategic use of the body. Paul B. Preciado, in Countersexual Manifesto, treats prostheses and worn objects as technologies that produce the body rather than decorate it. In that tradition a harness, a corset or a latex skin is not a costume over a true body. It is one of the ways a body gets made, and the sculptures take that claim seriously.

Queer is not a category the work belongs to. It is the thing the work does.

In everyday use "queer" has become an umbrella: a word for anyone whose gender or sexuality sits outside the expected. The work uses the word in the stricter sense it has carried since the early 1990s, when it was taken back from being an insult and sharpened into a method. Teresa de Lauretis coined "queer theory" in 1991 to name a way of thinking that refused to settle into fixed identities. David Halperin defined queer as "whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant", adding that "there is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence." Sedgwick, in Tendencies, called it the "open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances" that appears when the parts of anyone's gender or sexuality "aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically".

That is the definition the sculptures work to. A corset is a piece of shapewear, an item of fetish gear, a historical costume and an instrument of discipline, and Corset for a Person Who Doesn't Want One declines to be only one of those. A half body pattern is a tailor's draft and a portrait and a set of instructions for a body that does not exist yet. Leather is upholstery, saddlery, a jacket and a harness. None of the pieces can be made to mean one thing, and the hardware that holds them together is there to keep the different meanings in the same object rather than resolve them.

Judith Butler argued in "Critically Queer" that the word only keeps its force if it is "never fully owned", always being redeployed and twisted away from its previous use. The work takes that as a working rule. Queer here describes the artist, and it also describes the objects. In the objects it is a refusal, built into each object, to let a body, a garment or a material settle into the shape it is expected to hold.

An identity without an essence. A garment without a body. A pattern for someone who is not yet here.