There is an anachronistic beauty in that. Everyday troublesis a new book that explores transgender identity through paganism, ritual, and the landscape of the Garden of Eden. For the book’s author, Eddie Langham, this natural landscape (the image was taken in Sydenham Hill Woods) is at the heart of the imagery itself. Langham says, “I wanted to evoke the natural processes of budding, blossoming, decaying, and decaying in the story of the book. I think this is something most queer and trans people can relate to when expressing their own identity.”
It was dubbed “The Players.” Everyday troubles, teeth Puel Deorme, Ray Martins Ashton, Donna Marcus Duke (Text, Marcia, Gardens, and Fucking Liberals With photos of Ely Rose and Karin Sarkizova.At once at home in the landscape and yet at the same time removed from it, somewhere between past and present, it is a cyclical continuation of the growth, decay and regeneration of the garden and the natural world.
Langham says the works are inspired by historical fashion, but the historical references to royal aesthetics and silhouettes “represent the idea that transgender identity has been present since the beginning of culture, but has been excluded from art history.” The book is designed to offer “an alternative timeline to our erasure, centering and celebrating trans and queer people in a fashion aesthetic and costume that we would not have had access to.” This idea is echoed by Rose, who appreciates the element of fantasy present in these images. “If we had this history, what would it have been like? What would we want future generations to look back on?”
Transgender identity has always had a complex relationship with the past, including historical erasure and the burdens and expectations that transgender people feel in the present. This tension is Fucking liberalThe text by Donna Marcus Duke wrestles with the inescapable image of Marsha P. Johnson wearing a flower crown. The essay tries to understand what happens when a person becomes an icon. As Duke puts it, “transgender people, our relationship to our own materiality.” And because how that is interpreted by others can often be dangerous, I think people tend to find refuge in the spiritual.” Everyday troubles It explores both the spiritual in material life and what it means to make spirituality less abstract.
For Wrangham, these ideas are expressed in the following relations: Everyday troubles What does it have to do with paganism? They explain that “much of Britain’s historic folk tradition has a trance energy that is at odds with our own historical erasure.” This is apparent in the images themselves, where the flowing gowns and elaborate ornamentation (veils, armour, hoods) feel ripped from a folk horror film alongside pastoral scenes and decaying ruins. For Rose, their own queerness is “found in paganism and the occult.” […] The persecution of something as natural as paganism, one of our oldest spiritualities, feels adjacent in many ways to the queer experience,” Wrangham writes poetically about this: “Transitioning and bringing your outside into line with your inside is a magical, supernatural experience in a way that goes against the ‘order’ of things assigned to you by patriarchy.”
“Transitioning and bringing one’s outer self into line with one’s inner self is in some sense a magical, supernatural experience, one that goes against the patriarchal ‘order’ of things.” – Eddie Wrangham
The central metaphor is Everyday troubles – From gardens to the natural world to the material remains of a bygone era, the images and text refuse to suggest the merely utopian, instead offering something strange, compelling, even magical, but one that requires surrender. At its heart is community, of what has been lost and what is to come, Duke writes in an essay: “We wear flowers as gardens, for together we are sacred.” Whether this divinity is attainable has not been revealed, nor should it be revealed.
Transformative nature Everyday troubles – Whether it’s the imagery of the garden or the mutability of trans identity, the garden offers a more material kind of freedom, which Rose expresses through the language of the garden itself: “Just as flowers bloom and fall, no matter how cold the frost, they will bloom again in the spring. So too are queer and trans people. These are flowers that grow from the cracks in the flagstones, creep between the bricks and take root beneath the foundations of houses. Queerness is as natural as ancient forests, older than stone circles.”
