Mae Howard, Untitled (blue drowning), 2024, medium format film, 60 x 60 inches. Image of a white person immersed in a body of water, appearing as if they are falling backwards.
MAE HOWARD
Artist Statement
My multimedia practice, which includes lens-based media, sculpture, installation, and performance, explores my lived experience as a disabled, trans person who is an active participant in the Leather community. Exploring the allegorical and material potential of bondage, discipline, submission, and trust, my work imbues BDSM with a potent sense of agency and mutual care. Through works that are alternately sleek and abject, clinical and empathic, I create reductive, narrative forms that often connect medical paraphernalia—portable hospital screens, used catheters, canes—to the accoutrement and practice of sadomasochism. My embodied personal experience with the latter becomes a conduit for a systemic critique of the medical industrial complex based on lived realities that have revealed these connections. More than a conceptual fantasy, these transfigurations of oppression and pain are ritualistic acts that turn routine encounters—from the intimacy of a doctor’s inspections, to the “othering” gaze of ableism and transphobia—into cathartic and subversive modes of expression.
Recent sculptural work such as Icarus and Velocity of a swing explore suspension as a measurement of endurance in time, space, and place. Made from the medical trapeze devices attached to hospital beds to enable physical therapy, and related lift equipment, they are reconfigured through meat hooks, nipple clamps, and a steel replica of my torso. These sculptures propose and reclaim grasping, hanging, roving, and gliding as crip improvisational movements that are both interpersonal and relational.