This unpublished series of self-portraits, taken between May 2021 and late 2023, marks the conclusion of the creative cycle that culminated in my solo exhibition What’s Written on the Body in October 2024. I chose not to show these images publicly at the time, given the presence of many colleagues and clients in the gallery that night. In some ways, I regret that decision. Art should not be apologetic, nor should it compromise—but sometimes it’s just morally easier to do both. Anyway. I offer them now, especially as it is somehow more acceptable to be prurient online than in person.

Not that prurience is entirely the point here. I perceive a distinct Puritanism in contemporary queer art these days—a shift in which political discourse often displaces raw sexuality in ways that earlier generations of queer artists did not allow. Queer body art becomes so freighted with political intention that the flesh disappears beneath the argument. But the opposite also appears: the work is not political at all but consciously or subconsciously seductive—the body becomes an advertisement for sex appeal, a curated invitation.

Neither of these approaches feels relevant to my experience. The photographs in this series are neither political in any didactic sense, nor are they sexy. The body is the subject, but it is not presented as desirable, nor as typical. Instead, the body becomes an object of contemplation of one’s past rather than a site of pleasure or protest.

But these images are also about loneliness. During one of these shoots, while attempting to write on my own lower back with a magic marker [the word “faggot” appearing in the photo centre top of Lite Brite Nude: Ecstasy] I found I wanted someone to help me with the task. Not just for practical reasons, but because the act of writing on another person’s body requires a degree of intimacy I realized I did not have. To crave someone comfortable enough with your body and familiar enough with your mind to perform such a small and strange act may seem trivial or ridiculous. But to me I understood in that moment that having someone access the places you couldn’t reach was the ultimate purpose of love and intimacy and suddenly not having such a person felt like a lack too vast to endure. So these photographs are, ultimately, a document of that lack. Beneath the overt exhibitionism of a sexually frustrated, submissive gay male lies a profound sense of isolation and apartness. The body on display is not an offering. It is evidence.

Green # 3

Aqua # 4

Blue # 5

What’s Written on the Body contained a number of images of me covered head-to-toe in black paint, all taken in a single session in June of 2021. I envisioned this entire series as shame symbolized by black paint over skin.

Shameless # 1

Shameless # 2

Shameless # 3

Checked Shirt

I appreciate the act of converting photographs through photo editing into something artificial and contrived. I understand Marcel Duchamp when he asked why should we create by hand what machinery and technology can create for us?

Colourful Bottom

[Above] A self-portrait copied onto laminate and placed over a wooden board smeared with paint.

Nightside

Dick Pic

The only close up dick shot in the series. The paint and brush are not props—I carefully painted my own body in preparation for the session, and from that same body of work, many less provocative frames were selected for exhibition. Of all the work in this online exhibit and the public showing, this one remains the most explicit. It is also a statement outside its singular context: as a queer bottom, your own cock often becomes irrelevant compared to the top’s. Here I reclaim it—not as a sexual organ, but as a work of art.

Lite Brite Nude: Ecstasy

The top-right photograph depicts Saint Sebastian—a Christian martyr who has long been embraced as a queer icon and appears frequently throughout my work. I first encountered him through Derek Jarman’s film Sebastiane in the 1980s, and he has stayed with me ever since.

Atman

Atman is representative of the Hindu concept of the universal consciousness within. A kind of worship of the self. Those who have seen this piece comment that it appears that I am jerking off to a giant image of myself on the wall. This was not the intent, though if it was it would not be entirely out of place. Self obsession often includes an interest in one’s own body, either a rejection of it or lusting after it which ultimately can be interpreted as the same obsession.

What’s Written on The Body

The exhibition included several images of my body overlaid with Google Maps of the region where I was raised. In these pieces, I am working through acceptance of my own sexuality against the painful backdrop of growing up in a rural, homophobic town.

Post Office

Quick Facts

The following is the oldest image in the series, photographed before 2021 during a period when I was physically out of shape. I had also just lost a bunch of weight and my skin was loose and had not retracted yet. Including this photograph was difficult—even in art, a queer man wants to present his body in the best possible light. But omitting it would have been dishonest. The title is meant to represent the flight into wisdom after the body has deteriorated.

Guru

Several photographs in the exhibition emerged from sessions in which I covered my body in paint. The body served as canvas—an exploration of the self as surface, the physical form temporarily transformed into a site of mark-making. There was no prescribed conceptual framework beyond the act itself: the novelty of treating one’s own flesh as a medium, the body both author and substrate.

Nude, with Frog

I lost my dog Spot last February. Discovering this image among other self-portraits from that period, I recognized that my dog and I embodied the intimacy of constant companionship—a relationship without guile, false modesty, or embarrassment. It is the most intimate and revealing of all the photographs in this exhibition.

Sleeping

The below mural was created on my bedroom wall over several months using block prints and photographs on paper or laminate and taped in place. Measuring over twelve feet high by seven feet wide, it was intended as the culmination of the nudes exhibited here—some of the photographs and artworks shown above appear within the mural itself. Titled The Passion of Shawn Holbrook, the work draws on two meanings of ‘passion’: the Passion of Christ and the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, who was killed by a Roman guard for refusing his sexual advances. Shawn Holbrook was the name of my alter ego during the time I lived in California.

The Passion of Shawn Holbrook

That’s the end of the cycle and What’s Written on the Body is now officially over as I move on to new work. In September my new novel will come out and I will play author for a bit. I am considering a new art installation as well. Updates to come.