Institution
Belfast School of Art, Ulster University
Medium
Photography
Graduation Year
Class of 2025
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'Becoming' is a photographic project that aims to explore what it means to live beyond preconditioning and oppression, both in how I experience myself and how I invite others to see. Exploring themes of identity, perception, and transformation, this project reflects on how subjective experience shapes the way we see the world and ourselves. I’m inspired by Jack Babuscio’s concept of the 'gay sensibility', which frames queerness as a perspective shaped by oppression. For me however, queerness is not just about oppression; it is also about resistance, perception, attentiveness, and finding truth beyond what we’ve been taught to accept.I work with black and white 35mm film because of its tactility, its imperfection, and the time it demands. The process of shooting and developing creates a rhythm that mirrors the slowness and complexity of identity formation. I embrace the marks, grains, dust and chemical inconsistencies that often appear on the negatives. Through my eyes these are not flaws, but evidence of process. They speak to something unfinished and in motion.Nature is central to this work. I return to it again and again as both subject and metaphor. In its refusal to stay the same, I find a mirror for queer identity. Just as a landscape erodes, blooms, or reclaims itself, queerness too is an ongoing negotiation, a state of becoming rather than being. I see parallels in the way nature defies binaries: growth alongside decay, softness within strength, stillness inside motion. Through 'Becoming', I aim to embrace the fluidity of nature and queerness as it forms, dissolves, and becomes anew. It is a quiet surrender to awareness and change, shaped by both the natural world and the queer experience. This work is not about arriving somewhere certain, but about remaining open to emergence.
