Reconfiguring Desire: Evolving the Language of Attraction

Uniform and Desire 

For me, making art has always been a way of exploring what lies beneath attraction, the signals, codes, and gestures that make something or someone compelling. My earlier works were bold and immediate: they played with visual cues from fetish culture and identity, often using symbols that carried strong emotional charge. At the time, that directness felt right, it reflected a desire to confront visibility and reclaim imagery that is often marginalised or misunderstood.

But as my practice has developed, I’ve realised that attraction is more intricate than a surface image. It’s not a static object or emblem, but a living system, one made of tension, reflection, and perception. With Configurations of Desire, I’ve begun to reframe how I visualise intimacy and identity. Rather than focusing on recognisable motifs, I’m working with abstraction, gesture, and texture, building a language that feels both personal and universal.

These new print-works translate the mechanics of desire into form: gears, structures, and interlocking shapes that echo the rhythm of connection. Each print or composition becomes a small architecture of feeling, sensual, psychological, but never literal. The line, the trace, the smudge, these are now the spaces where attraction happens.

I’ve also become more aware of how imagery can be interpreted differently across audiences and contexts. What might begin as celebration can sometimes be seen as provocation, and I want to honour that tension thoughtfully. This shift in aesthetic isn’t about retreating from the erotic, but about deepening it, finding ways to speak about desire through metaphor rather than mimicry.

This evolution is part of my ongoing conversation with gay identity, masculinity, and visibility. I’m still drawn to the energy, the humour, and the defiance that first inspired me, but now, I’m exploring them through a quieter kind of intensity.

Configurations of Desire is where attraction becomes structure, where intimacy becomes geometry, and where individuality is shaped not by what we show, but by how we connect.

The first in the Configurations of Desire series is: Explorer Gear T-shirt