Burn the Sheets: an exhibition of trans domesticities , 2025

Curation: Sam Godfrey & Marf Summers
House of Annetta, London

Participating artists:
Sam Godfrey 
Rudy Loewe 
Pear Nuallak
Lou Lou Sainsbury 
Rose Schmits 
Marf Summers 
Chole Swords & Jory Cherry 

Exhibition Design: Marf Summers
Graphic Design: Flo Low
Photography: Connor Pope & Val Enfys

This exhibition was made possible by support from the AHRC & University of Exeter Engaged and Participatory Research Fund Award

Curatorial notes

Burn the sheets and scatter the ashes softly in the streets. Burn the sheets and take up arms. Burn the sheets and wrap yourself, reborn, in fresh ones.

In this group show of 8 trans artists, we welcome guests into a slippery, malleable realm- that of the trans domestic.  These are landscapes of rage and pleasure, of longing and connection, with artworks sitting in the context of the precarity and violence of an ongoing housing crisis that disproportionately impacts LGBTQIA+ communities. The home and its imagining in the 21st Century continues to be a site in which gender-norms are produced and reproduced, but Burn The Sheets desires to explore worlds beyond ‘queer domesticity’ and the focus on anti-normative approaches to domestic life.  The works selected show the many ways we as trans people make home and domestic spaces, actively resisting the urge to define, categorise or taxonomise trans domesticity, poking around in the messy and unpredictable desire for home, in the minutiae of the mundane, our relationships to everyday objects and their surroundings, the things we build, break down and rebuild for ourselves and each other.

This is an artist-led collaborative project, in which we eschew the project of visibility as spectacle, or the fallacy of making of any kind of legible, stable trans aesthetics. Instead, Burn the Sheets turns towards artists whose works touch on a desire for shapeshifting, crafting and intimacy - approaches that allow us to live.

- Sam Godfrey & Marf Summers  

Rose Schmits
Crawler Pot 009, 2024
porcelain

Cheep Cheep, 2022
Watch out he’s got a knife, 2022
porcelain, cobalt on white tin glaze, pink glazed base