Francis Whorrall-Campbell (UK)
Residency period: September-November 2024
Born in 1995 in the northwest of England, Francis Whorrall-Campbell is an artist, researcher, and writer with a background in art history and theory who now lives and works in Oxford. Inspired by the history of gender transition, DIY transition tactics, the anti-disciplinarity of trans life, and the support system that follows, Whorrall-Campbell produces texts, collective structures, and altered commercial objects that engage with trans people’s relationships with structures of power, knowledge, and capital. Guided by fun, joy, and the subversive power of jokes, and providing material, historical, and imaginative resources, Whorrall-Campbell’s work attempts to make trans-identity possible in and despite hostile environments.
Whorrall-Campbell has published works in The White Review, The Architectural Review, Art Monthly, and e-flux, and in anthologies published by Pilot Press, Prototype Press, and Ugly Duckling Presse. Their recent work has been shown at Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo, Castellón de la Plana (2023), National Sculpture Factory, Cork (2023), MK Gallery, Milton Keynes (2023), Modern Art, Oxford (2023), Auto Italia in London (2022), Catalyst Arts in Belfast (2021), the Wysing Arts Centre in Cambridge (2021), and the Centre for Contemporary Art in Londonderry (2021-2022), where Whorrall-Campbell is a research associate. Francis Whorrall-Campbell is currently completing a PhD, provisionally entitled: Inhabiting a Poetics of Confusion: Identity and Instability in Transition.
At La Becque, Whorrall-Campbell intends to begin research for a new critical writing project entitled Cow/boy Pony/Girl: The True Trans-Species T4T History of HRT. Developing a new writing methodology that blends fiction, cultural criticism, and historical analysis, they will investigate the origins of hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Starting with the first experiments in testosterone synthesis and estrogen hormone isolation, which were conducted in the 1930s, Whorrall-Campbell’s work will attempt to demonstrate how HRT is intertwined with colonial and eugenic conceptions of human evolution, while offering an alternative future for these trans-specific initiatives that disrupt gender-focused normative medical production.