Meet Artist-in-Residence Sweatmother

Sweatmother is an artist and filmmaker based in London. His moving image work blends performance, self-recorded documentation, and archival materials to explore and make visible Queer lived experiences. Experimental techniques are often incorporated throughout his work such as an image making technique using a video synthesizer. He seeks to create art for his community to share, learn from and find solace in sensitive depictions of their shared raw realities and obscured histories.

Sweat is the founder of Otherness Archive, an accessible online-based archive, that gathers together on one platform work by and for the Trans and Queer community. The archive combines pioneering contemporary audiovisual works with their pre-existing counterparts, creating a space where past, present and future coexist in a joint mission on “interventions against forgetting” work representative of the Trans and Queer experience.

On his current residency, he said:

My project will explore Leather as history and legacy, rooted in a distinct Trans-masculine desire. I will focus on creating a moving image work that interrogates and complicates the structures of masculinity, moving beyond the biological to reconstruct presentation and desire through alternative masculinities, including the Mexicana “macho”.

Like the T-masc phantom limb, the work remains in flux—experimental, shifting, and unresolved—drawing on objects and forgotten archives. It engages with the archive of fantasy to reclaim history from absence, tracing the legacy of leather as both material and metaphor. Expanding into the cinematic language of the “road movie”, this work seeks to empower T-masc spectators by offering a space to visualize and reimagine their histories through an immersive, expansive performance.

 

Published: 5th September 2025

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