Andrew Fraser

Artist biography

I tend to present my gender much like a bird of paradise: bright, loud, and obnoxious. Outside of my art, my style is one of my biggest creative outlets.

Growing up queer, transgender, and disabled in a small factory town has meant that I am achingly aware of how my body directly shapes the way I am able to experience the world. Each time I leave my home my body becomes a collection plate for prying stares, probing questions, and unwelcome advice. Every interaction I have with people, buildings, the weather is seeped in tactile and emotional repercussions brought about by my embodiment and the societal expectations and prejudice pressed upon it.

Rather than trying to buck the discomfort or repulsion that can come with theses experiences, I seek to embrace and celebrate this monstrosity that society casts upon me. My art is a rallying cry to revel in the discordant, gross, painful, and unruly ways in which we live, championing the messiness that is having a physical body and the overwhelming experience of being known.

My work asks what it means to be embodied, examining how our physicality both informs and is formed by the spaces we exist in. My work navigates my own experience as a disabled, transgender individual through the creation of monstrous forms, manifesting the Other into tactile space and creating a lens through which we can interrogate the ‘monstrous’ bodies that society rejects.

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