(Un)carved

This photography came to my mind during one of my ceramics classes. As an agender, other people have tried to carve me again and again to fit gendered roles. At the same time, others have tried to cover me, to change what I am, painting glaze over my soul. In the photography the lace cut outs illustrate this carving aspect with their shape and the covering part by the fact they're visibly glued to me, hiding my real skin. I've been treated like a ceramic, carved and glazed, and yet I was already naturally adorned, stars on my skin. But it was never to the taste of others, for years my head covered by their expectations, unable to understand what I was. But with time, the lace covering my face and identity became the white sheet put on me as I was going into surgery. It is a picture of the inside and outside, of the past and present. At the end, I was not fired by their desire for gender conformity, my body and soul are a wild clay, shaped only by me and riverbeds that embrace me.