The Clearing

Heavy Leather explores pleasure as power, resistance, and healing. Deconstructed bed sheets, jock straps, silk, rubber, bronze, and glass carry the materiality of touch and tenderness. This body of work approaches dominance and submission as gestures of care and consent, inviting the viewer into a ritual space of devotion where power exchange unfolds as a language of intimacy. Inspired by Audre Lorde’s seminal essay ‘Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power’, a research trip to the Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago, and the work of feminist and queer activists, this exhibition emerges from histories of collective resistance, community empowerment, and shared practices of queer joy.