Seosamh “Joe” Lily, Artist

I’m Seosamh “Joe” Lily, a trans artist and a hazy memory of the 1980s. Both in comics and my personal traditional practise, I focus on identity, and how this is shaped through transness, queerness, trauma, diaspora, fatness… this takes both a literal and magical realist form, whether through the genre-based framework like SUPERPOSE, the massive sci-fi comic series I make with my partner Anka, or the trans-centred iconography of my paintings. I’m older now, but I spent so much of my life uncertain of how to merge myself with the world, how to make it through “properly”, “appropriately”, “despite” being a trans and gay boy. My work is an undoing of that stuck position. It’s embracing, processing and deconstructing the good and the hurt, on my terms, in my image or the ones I know/seek to know. If it’s not a home, it’s at least a shelter, or a map, and a conversation. I love this about it, very much.