Amen Sluts
A sculptural series of 3D-printed, hand-finished “Madonnas” that sanctifies trans women and sex workers erased from LGBTQ+ origin stories—reclaiming the slur “slut” as a title of glory and a political demand.
The sculptural series AMEN SLUTS proposes a contemporary apocryphal altar for those written out of official LGBTQ+ histories—transgender women and sex workers who carried early liberation movements while remaining persistently profaned, criminalized, or politely erased. Appropriating Marian iconography, the works reroute sanctity toward bodies the mainstream has insisted on treating as disposable.
Positioned against the comforts of contemporary homonormativity and its cis-centred origin stories, AMEN SLUTS restores these “founding mothers” as subjects rather than footnotes. The figurines do not offer reverence as nostalgia; they stage a visual cult as a counter-archive, insisting on lineage where the record prefers silence.
Formally, the series operates in deliberate contradiction: religious kitsch meets camp excess meets contemporary fabrication. 3D printing enables seriality—echoing the reproducibility of devotional objects—while hand-finishing reintroduces contingency, touch, and difference. Saturated colour, exaggerated ornament, and canonical attributes collide with the specificity of historical figures, producing Madonnas that are unmistakably synthetic and insistently present.
These are not objects for private consolation. They function as demands: small monuments that refuse respectability politics and return the slur “slut” to its speakers, not softened but sharpened—reclaimed as a title, a refusal, and a form of glory.