Theo Trotter: Interview for Staging Decadence

Fig. 1: Theo Trotter, Cocoon (2022). Latex, textiles, polyfill, lace, gauze bandage, pins. Photo by Lauren Bradshaw.

Theo Trotter is a Chicago-based artist working primarily with textiles, silicone, and found materials. His practice explores the trans body through sculpture and installation, putting opposing facets of transformation into proximity and dialogue with one another: pain and transcendence, beauty and disgust, embodiment and abjection. For his Cocoon (2022-23) and Larval (2023) series, Trotter created iterated, amorphous forms that were comprised of polka-dotted fabrics, safety pins, tiny pieces of costume jewellery, and gauze and ace bandages used in medical contexts and to bind the chest. Some look like severed appendages or amputated human organs – possibly livers, possibly wombs – while others seem to have left the human behind altogether, both alien and undefinable. They are assertive and monstrous forms, but also delicate and tender, too. For his Lace (2024-25) series, Trotter replaced thin, tight, and strictly latticed lace work – highly gendered in fashion and lingerie – with thick and disorderly webs of silicone that hang loosely from floor to ceiling or wall to wall in gallery spaces. They look a bit like umbilical cords. The visceral process of making their works also leave marks on them. Fingerprints remain pressed into pieces of silicone, and what looks like dried blood soils gauze bandages. What emerges is a layering of meaning and signification that traverses neat binaries that order and taxonomize. These works are at once assertive and vulnerable, violent and tender, and abjection is treated not simply as that which is cast out, but as that which is subject to careful and meticulous refinement.

Adam Alston: I first came across your work through the fantastic craft and textile project Decorating Dissidence. What struck me was how layered it was. The forms you make are ambiguous – ambivalent, even – and seem to be at once disturbing and captivating.

Theo Trotter: That’s what I aim for. I love hearing that!

AA: Where did the practice begin, and how has it evolved?

TT: How it’s evolved over time has been complicated. I started out as a painter in my undergraduate studies, but over time I started utilising more and more textile materials in mixed media works. I got increasingly bored with painting and gradually moved away from it, although it helped clarify some of my interests and the qualities of the materials I was working with, as well as their meanings: how they change based on context, and how they’re layered together. Ultimately, my interest is in the creation of a material language.

Over time I started using more medical materials, as well as materials that have a fleshy, bodily quality, like latex or silicone. The Cocoon works involve a lot of bandages, which is in reference to medical gender transition. I used a process of bandaging to create a form, which is how I started working sculpturally. People often talk about my work in relation to identity, but I feel that’s not quite right. It’s more of an open-ended definition of transness that I’m aiming for, approaching it through materiality and craft.

Fig. 2: Theo Trotter, Larval, detail (2023). Latex, pink glitter glue, bandages, textiles, children’s tights, stuffed animal, plastic beads, pins, poly-fil, lace. Photo by Theo Trotter.

AA: Where does your use of needles and pins fit with this open-ended definition of transness and your manipulation of materials?

TT: The use of pins came about through exploring the relationship between injury and healing, and through imagery that has elements of attraction and repulsion at the same time, breaking down that dichotomy. I think about situations like surgery, where the body is subject to a violent act and cut open with a knife, but it can also be an act of reconstructive healing. The same is true of so many instances in life.

A lot of what was interesting to me about the pins was the way that they pierce and harm the material, while also serving as part of the structure that holds it together. The visibility of the pins also gives the work a provisional quality. Usually pins are a part of the process of sewing something [like clothing], only to be removed later on. I wanted to preserve them in the finished object as a way of allowing the sculpture to be in the middle of becoming something, so that it doesn’t have a fixed quality. The delicateness of the pins, and how that coexists with their sharpness, was also attractive to me. It points to complicated notions of care.

AA: Your interest in states of transition seems to me to come across most clearly in the Cocoon, Larval and Lace series, which all seem to imply some kind of gestational quality: umbilical cords in Lace, larvae in Larval, wombs in Cocoon. These works are pregnant with possibility, but not in the heteronormalising sense. They suggest the possibility of birthing something or sustaining something in a gestational state, though quite what is unclear.

Fig. 3: Theo Trotter, Larval (2023). Latex, pink glitter glue, bandages, textiles, children’s tights, stuffed animal, plastic beads, pins, poly-fil, lace. Photo by Theo Trotter.

TT: Like you said, they imply pregnancy, but not in the heteronormative sense. They’re about transformation. Transition tends to be simplified into this process of a before and after image, when in reality human existence doesn’t work that way. I’m resisting the idea of pinning down trans embodiment and turning it into a static diagnostic label. I’m suggesting a constant state of flux in place of that.

Fig. 4: Theo Trotter, Lace form I, detail (2024). Silicone, gauze bandages. Photo by Theo Trotter.

AA: Hence your use of the term ‘palimpsest’ in describing your work? Although another key term for me is ambivalence. Things are made to appear in a particular way where they might signify an umbilical cord, but they might just as well signal lace or elastic. So what is appearance doing in these works? What kind of appearance is at stake? Please forgive these questions, as I’m a theatre scholar and not a sculptural artist, so I’m bringing my own interests and prejudices to the table…

TT: Yea, so something that I find interesting about your project [Staging Decadence] and placing my work somewhere within the research that you’re doing is that you’re coming from a performance background. I’ve always had the sense that my works are performing. On some level, I think of them as living beings, which change a little bit depending on how I arrange them or place them. Sometimes when I am in the process of installing them, they behave in ways I don’t want or expect them to. There is a collaborative element because I try to respect their agency in that regard. Some of the Cocoon works also contain certain substances, like liquid latex, that actually change and degrade over time. They age like a body. They have a performative quality.

AA: And a tactile quality, too.

TT: Silicone is such a tactile material to be working with! Its synthetic quality, even its shine, makes it feel like it should come out of a body. It’s interesting you bring that up as even the process for me is extremely tactile. There are traces of my touch left in the material, which is especially true of the silicone lace because that process involves mixing the silicone, which comes in a liquid form, and then pouring it in lines on the floor and then rolling it with my hands in order to form tubes. So touch is very important in the respect that there’s always traces of my touch left in the material, and that adds to the sense of palimpsest: different layers of materials, the way they’ve been handled, and their histories.

AA: Many of the materials you work with are already layered with potent meanings and significations. The particular kind of polka dot textile that you use in a couple of works seems quite reminiscent of adolescence to me.

Fig. 5: Theo Trotter, Cocoon III, detail (2023). Glitter glue, found textiles, gauze bandage, plastic beads, poly-fil, pins. Photo by Theo Trotter.

TT: They bring to mind images of childhood or adolescence for me, too. At the time I was wanting to address trans childhood or adolescence, which felt important to me for a lot of reasons. Part of it was seeing trans children and teenagers, and anyone in their lives who loves and cares for them, demonized and portrayed as monstrous by so many people. I wanted to express tenderness in opposition to that. I’m also looking to get past the mainstream concept of transness as a process of starting at point ‘A’ and ending at point ‘B’. It’s about your entire lifespan. It’s not about a diagnosis, and then surgery, and then a ‘finished’ person.

AA: The example of the pins is really interesting in this context, too. Wounding and healing are living concurrently. To use your response from earlier on, the pin is what is holding everything together; it’s not left behind.

TT: Yeah, I think that’s right. I’m trying to push against binarist conceptions.

AA: I guess one such binary would be embodiment and abjection. I’m in two minds about pulling abjection into this discussion, as it feels quite on the nose, but equally it seems super relevant. What makes it so interesting is how you approach the abject with such care. A lot of care and attention to detail has gone into crafting these objects. It’s what gets at the decadence of these works most of all, I think… The way you refine the abject in creating these strangely beautiful objects that both repel and attract.

Fig. 6: Theo Trotter, Lace form IV, detail (2025). Silicone, gauze bandage pads, surgical suture. Photo by Theo Trotter.

TT: The abject is very relevant, especially in relation to what you’re saying about beauty and the abject coexisting, and being seen as both disgusting or worthless, on some level, but that has also clearly been cared for. It complicates the line between injury and healing. Encountering something that has an element of beauty while evoking a feeling of disgust can prompt you to question the immediate gut reaction you have to something or someone.

AA: It also invites us to complicate the lines separating good taste from bad taste. What does it mean to contemplate and appreciate the meticulous crafting of these apparently wounded objects? We don’t explicitly see an open wound in your work, but it’s clearly implied.

TT: I guess I wasn’t thinking about taste specifically, but I think it ties into ideas about how taste categorises things as good or bad, or having worth or not having worth. It ties into ideas of what or who is worthy of care. It’s relevant in that sense.

AA: Is it okay if we pull back to something you were talking about earlier? You mentioned that the liquid latex you work with decomposes. Decomposition is built into the work as it gets older. To my mind this is a very decadent notion. Decadents were fascinated by the idea of refining decay and decomposition, or ‘ruin[ing] what ruins’ – which is a phrase from Sara Ahmed that we’ve referenced quite a bit on this blog. [1] Something can be ruinous, while at the same time having a critical and interrogative potential.

TT: It’s very interesting to hear that word in relation to my work because I had never thought about it or used it at all myself, but then the way you explained it as a concept of ruining that which ruins helped me realise there’s actually a really interesting subversive quality in the idea. In terms of the materiality of the work, it’s very relevant – like when I’m mis-using bandages or surgical sutures. It also relates to the creation of the silicone lace forms. I think of them as creatures that aim to mimic traditional bobbin lace. Through their exaggerated size and the sloppiness of the material, they ‘ruin’ the traditional lace forms by evolving into something else entirely. It breaks down this dichotomy of ruination and creation. I’m interested in how materials can simultaneously be used to create a form and deviate from it or even destroy it.

AA: To resist instrumentalism and the reduction of value and worth to utility is another notion that lends itself to decadence. You described how your works evoke ideas of worthlessness earlier, and how such ideas end up getting attached to particular kinds of body – although it seems to me that the body is endlessly alluded to in your sculptures and installations, while never being wholly present within them.

TT: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. I think of them as bodies, although there’s not a perfect word for what they are. I don’t like calling them ‘objects’ either, as it implies that they are static and that they have no agency. They cannot just be ‘used’. They are living bodies, but part of the reason I don’t explicitly depict the body has to do with trying to evade the way that trans people’s bodies are looked at. Certain bodies are viewed as wrong or as failures due to their ambiguity, I’m thinking of trans bodies here in particular, although they aren’t the only ones subject to this. This is also why the work is so personal. I draw from my own life and experience, and not wanting to be defined through the gaze of cis people. I push against the idea of a person having to be one thing, and against diagnostic categories that are used to define individuals. Being trans has essentially been defined as a mental illness – and still is now, at least in the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders]. This is why I want to push against pathologisation as a kind of fixity that chops individuals up into pieces.

Fig. 7: Theo Trotter, Installation view of Lace form I, II, and III (2024). Photo by Theo Trotter.

Fig. 8: Theo Trotter, Lace form II, detail (2024). Silicone. Photo by Theo Trotter.

AA: With that in mind, who do you want to engage with your work? Is there a specific audience you have in mind?

TT: Over time I feel more and more that my work is just for the people who are drawn to it. I think that’s the interesting thing about art. You don’t always have a conversation with the people that you think you will. Sometimes I make pre-judgments about how I think someone is going to react – like thinking an older person is going to be conservative and not like the work, but then get proven wrong – while a young trans person who I think will resonate with it ends up not liking it. In one sense I make the work for queer and trans people who might feel gross or bad or weird, but really I make it for myself, if I’m being honest, for my own satisfaction.

Notes

[1] Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 40.