WE BOTH LAUGHED IN PLEASURE
A NEW BODY OF WORK BY THE ARTIST GRACE PICKERING
We both laughed in pleasure is an assertion of transmasculine joy and an homage to community and intimacy.
Conceived over a five-year period, the portraits and film borrow their name from the text
We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, 1961-1991
The diaries follow the life of one of America’s first trans rights activists. Sullivan, who identified as a trans gay man, charts his early years recognising his identity through identification with The Beatles, his campaigns to change laws for transgender people in the US, and his final days living with HIV.
The writer was instrumental in Pickering’s understanding of their sexuality and gender, and here, the artist recreates the feeling of shared freedom and comfort the book’s title attests to.
“A radical testament to trans happiness”
Capturing moments of intentional connectivity
Enacted between photographer and subject, Pickering’s six photographic portraits of friends and community members simultaneously contribute to a canon of transmasculine representation that has, until recently, been scarce. Subjects are therefore boldly characterised as transmasculine figures misrepresented and/or obscured from history, including; Joa(n) of Arc, Harlem Renaissance blues singer Gladys Bentley, and Sullivan himself. Contextualising feelings and experiences through precedence, this process also revels in the pleasure that can be found in the act of becoming.
In Pickering’s film, which brings together archive footage of friends and acquaintances within their wider community, the artist seeks to draw links between nonbinary and trans men across geography to refute the stereotype of isolation often associated with transgender people, demonstrating the possibilities of solidarity and worldmaking.
“The films-culmination at the Trans March makes visible the dissolution of boundaries between the dyke and transmaculine communities”
FROM LONDON TO LOS ANGELES TO BROOKLYN, PICKERING INSTEAD PAINTS A CINEMATIC PICTURE OF A SUPPORTIVE AND BOUNDLESS COMMUNITY
ANIMATED BY LOVE.
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“I started taking the photos and making this film when struggling to make deep connections with others. The title makes me think of connectivity and the full-bodily freedom within that, of finding myself comfortable in another person’s presence. In the film, I discuss how I first met a nonbinary person at a house party and it was like looking in a mirror, or at least, how I’d have wanted that to feel. Later, the camera became another kind of mirror, as invited more interactions like that one. These kinds of fleeting interpersonal connections, and the discovery of books like Sullivan’s, have opened my eyes to the trans-masc community in ways that are at odds with what I had seen portrayed in mainstream media. We Both Laughed In Pleasure is an intentional celebration of thriving narratives.”
GRACE PICKERING
