Degree Show 2025

My degree show piece ‘Icarus Affection’ is a mixed media exploration into my experience of being groomed when I was a teenager, after downloading the gay dating app Grindr. This project started in collaboration with two gay men, both of whom i met on the app. This collaboration was only beknownst to one of them, Photographer Josh McNaughton, who took the photograph of me face down on the floor. at the same time i was working on this project josh had been working on a project of his own photographing gay men he had met on Grindr. I don’t know the name of the other man i collaborated with. The only things i know about him are that he’s 182.88 cm tall, 77kg heavy, married and under the impression that I’m a virginal classics student who loves father and son role-play. I corresponded with this man for about a week and eventually convinced him to send me a voice note of himself reading out an excerpt from Ovid’s Metamorphosis which poetically details the flight and fall of Icarus. He only agreed to do this as a part of an intense role-play episode which really tested my commitment to art. Over the following two months, I developed an installation working from the photograph, voice note, and myth—an approach informed by structuralist theories of myth as frameworks through which personal and collective meaning is constructed. The work engages with a formative period in my life that, in retrospect, operates as a kind of mythic structure: a narrative moment that shaped the trajectory of the following five years and my emergence a gay man.

Since coming out at 18, I’ve seen a lot of gay men, and while each has had his own story, a recurring theme I’ve noticed—both in their experiences and in my own—is a formative first sexual encounter that was, in some way, scarring. Often, this involved a significantly older man. I began to reflect on how these early encounters, happening at a time when someone is particularly impressionable, can quietly shape their understanding of sex, intimacy, and self. My own experience of being groomed on Grindr at sixteen marked the beginning of a process that shaped how I came to see myself as a gay man over the following years. What struck me most was how common this narrative was—how many others had similar stories. This sense of universality brought me to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist theory of myth, particularly the idea that myths are built from recurring patterns that help us make sense of personal and collective experience. His framework helped guide the development of the work. What has lingered for me, since completing the piece, is the cyclical nature of trauma in the queer community: the older men who pursue younger, vulnerable boys were often in those boys’ positions themselves, years earlier. In that way, the same story is replayed again and again—shifting in detail, but remaining eerily familiar, like a modern myth retold across generations.