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WET (in)FORM(ation)
written by Elena Cruz
WET (in)FORM(ation) has opened up an intimate space for comfortable, queer conversation by sharing artist Marf Summers’s bodily and mental health changes surrounding their gender affirming surgery. The exhibition is on display inside Brunswick Park’s former ladies toilets-turned-Outhouse Gallery through the 12th of October.
The solo show by artist and leatherworker Summers dictates their recovery experience by hanging photographic self-portraits around the gallery. In the 11 images, Summers poses with a self-constructed wet-leather form of their chest pre- and post-surgery. Introducing the photographs are snippets of first-person text plastered to the wall like plaques in a museum. The images then lead the viewer through the room, where the life-size leather form itself is positioned at the end of the gallery like a totem.
A walk-through turns Outhouse into a venue that encourages conversation about the complex emotions involved in queerness. By sharing Summers’s realities with gender affirming surgery, the show aims to help other trans individuals contemplate and discuss personal, vulnerable stories without, as highlighted in the show description, intrusion or concern about backlash.
‘It was not in any way intended to be something that I would ever show anyone else,’ Summers said about their accidental route they took to conceptualise the show.
Rather, WET (in)FORM(ation) started as more of a ‘personal archiving project,’ Summers said, until it evolved into ‘an unexpected, winding road,’ particularly following their unexpected struggles with mental health post-surgery.
Their changes are mapped out across Outhouse’s walls in three parts.
Part 1: Summers prepares for surgery by making a leather wet-form replica of their chest. The chest itself took two months to create and involved various sculptural techniques including wet-moulding to transform the flat veg-tan leather into an organic shape.
The text guides the viewers through the start of the process, alongside Summers’s emotional reflections: ‘Wet forming became an unexpected way to make peace — kneading and caressing this leather chest — at once mine and not. I got to know its dimension and shape in my hands. We spent a lot of time together. With the form sitting on my workbench over the weeks, working at it from time to time, I began to forget it was ‘mine’.’
Part 2 is one of ‘haunting significance,’ Summers said: They face complications starting two weeks after surgery, filled with a flare-up of OCD with an obsessive theme of transness and identity, and difficulties with the sensory changes due to their autism. Two weeks post-surgery, as Summer writes in the text, ‘My mind started to unravel.’
The text continues to illustrate: ‘Top surgery sounds like one big change overnight, but actually it is hundreds of changes all at once, and for me, as an autistic person, it was a sensorily destabilising experience. The physical sensations fed the OCD: something feeling different, my brain read as something being wrong.’
The section ends with the consideration about their wet-form: ‘I have wondered if I should destroy it.’
Summers discussed Part 2 after the show: ‘You’re already doing this thing that so many people don’t want you to do, and there’s this huge amount of pressure to only feel euphoria afterwards. And then because no one can really talk about complicated experiences — or even just the banal reality of recovery being hard, you won’t necessarily feel amazing for one to two months or something — that means that when you are feeling a bit not great, you’re like, ‘Oh I’m the first person to ever have felt this way,’ … but that’s actually just not the reality.’
This leads to Part 3: It’s one year after surgery. Here, Summers has to pull their leather chest out of their wardrobe to prepare for the Outhouse exhibition. This physical act helped demonstrate Summers’s sense of detachment. It was almost as if they ‘alchemised’ the experience, they said.
The text reads: “In the months of topless sauna trips, fully embodied sexual encounters, shirtless dancing, and half-naked breakfast cooking experiences that followed it being stowed away, I had completely forgotten it was there. Digging it out to show the work this month felt emblematic of my ongoing recovery from OCD, of choosing which thoughts to give my attention to, and what that attention looks like, rather than attempting to eliminate or even strictly categorise ‘bad’ thoughts from ‘good’.’
The exhibition escapes the confines of black-and-white perspectives. It uses a non-binary lens on gender to illustrate the reality of Summers’s gender affirming surgery. Therefore, by sharing Summers’s experience, the exhibition makes room for others to discuss their own applications of queerness.
‘There are so many stories like this, and I think that plenty of people in our community would love to make space for them, but it’s incredibly high risk,’ Summers said. ‘If you publicly talk about this stuff, there are just so many people who have really powerful positions within the media system who would jump on it, as a way to say people shouldn’t be doing these things, we shouldn't be allowing people to have surgery or we should make it incredibly hard to do so, when actually what we need is everything to be way more chill, way less high stakes.’
Co-curator Elisha Fall also discussed the importance of opening up queer dialogue today.
‘Hetero is the idea that there’s just one, and queerness is the idea that there can be so many different things, like personal stories, for example,’ Fleming said. ‘That’s what makes it important because it’s not just one generic story, and that’s what makes it relatable deep down.’
Co-Curator Caitlin Fleming followed Fall’s comment by adding, ‘I think that’s exactly what queerness has been historically. There’s been a lot of storytelling, shared knowledge, or shared skills around being queer. It’s like talking to each other, teaching each other what queerness looks like on one person, and how you can change and adapt that to fit yourself.’
Fleming, Fall, and their final co-curator Isabel Reed decided to display Summers’s work at Outhouse after going to their studio and seeing Summers’s perspective on making a space queer.
‘Marf had this really interesting perspective: does it need to be a queer utopia space, does it need to be a new space, or is it about transforming the space you already are in to suit your needs? I just thought that was a really powerful way of thinking,’ Fall said.
With that, transforming Outhouse into a room for safe discussion about transness was a statement itself, they continued.
‘It’s almost like a reclaiming of the space,’ Fall said. ‘As a trans person, Marf is taking the space and making it into something it obviously was not before, but still keeping the architecture of it. They made a completely new world within the four walls, which is amazing and really beautiful as well — especially thinking about trans legislation, the use of toilets. I think it’s really powerful to have a show like this within the Outhouse, in the women’s toilet, specifically as a trans person.’
WET (in)FORM(ation)
Marf Summers
Curated by Isabel Reed,
Caitlin Fleming,
and Elisha Fall
3rd-12th October 2025
at outhouse gallery
Marf Summers
Curated by Isabel Reed,
Caitlin Fleming,
and Elisha Fall
3rd-12th October 2025
at outhouse gallery