Marf Summers

Outhouse Gallery 

3 - 12 Oct 2025

Opening: 2 Oct 6-9pm

In WET (in)FORM(ation), Marf Summers stages a look into an unintentional project formed from the quiet archival urge to document the artist’s chest in the weeks before gender affirming surgery. Creating a wet form leather replica of their chest, the artist offers up processes of acceptance and intimacy, conducting a reverse engineering of the surgery that they were about to undertake. What started as a purely material experiment soon developed an unexpected meditation, massaging the moistened skin of the leather, creating round forms from a flat canvas, echoing the gestures of surgery. The form carried a striking presence and led to a series of self-portraits that reframed the chest as “strapped on,” emphasising its would-be flatness. Through the creation and documentation of a leather chest, the artist unwittingly develops a haunting talisman to be passed from a pre-flat world through recovery to a life post-surgery. These pieces within the close-quarters of Outhouse gallery diarises the mental effect of extreme sensory changes filtered through an autistic mind during their recovery. In the wake of the operation, they found solace and conflict through the wet mould, reactivating it as a point of adjustment and distress while they grappled with a flare-up of OCD. Ruminating, through the wearing of the chest on a familiar and unfamiliar sense of bodily self. This installation through its tenancy at outhouse invites participants into the protective secrecy that often surrounds transition, framing the unspoken and often complex emotions of recovery, it aims to offer space where trans individuals can share personal recovery stories, and where vulnerability can be witnessed without intrusion or fear of backlash.

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