Elle Berman
Queer, trans work in leather, latex and cloth
Dublin
Six ways of being fitted.
Work proposal · 2026 – 2033
A fitting is the moment a body is measured against a garment and one of them is told to change. Alterations is a proposed series of six works that take that moment apart.
Tailoring assumes the body is the fixed thing and the cloth is what gives. Being trans, and being fitted, taught me the opposite is often expected: the garment is the standard, and the body is the thing to be altered, bound, padded, flattened or hidden until it fits. Each work in the series isolates one version of that demand and refuses it in a different way. The refusal is never destructive. Everything is made with the full care of the trade it argues with: saddle-stitched, wet-moulded, glued and polished. The craft is what makes the refusal legible as a decision rather than a failure.
The six are ordered as a fitting would be. Second Skin is the body itself, split into the two materials the series is made from: leather that keeps a shape and latex that gives it up the moment the body leaves. Fitting is the garment and its pattern, hung side by side, where the finished jacket has forgotten the body and the offcuts remember it. Corset is the garment built to a body nobody has, laced tight and still open. Reliquary is what a year of daily correction leaves behind, sealed so it can never be used again, beside the garment that was made for the body instead of against it. Pattern Pieces is the body drafted as a pattern, with only one side cut, because patterns assume symmetry and bodies don't deliver it. Last, Lineup is the long work: one latex cast of my body a year for seven years, hung in a row, each one perfect on the day and identical once empty, so that seven years of transition are present in the room and recorded by none of the casts. Read in sequence the works move from the body, through the garment, to what the garment does to the body, to the body as something that could be re-cut, and finally to the body changing over time while the garments stay the same.
The series is designed to be shown as one room. Two wall works, two objects on plinths, one hung piece and the rail, all at the scale of a single adult, so a visitor stands among them at the size of the body they describe. The images here are visualisations made to establish scale, material and presence; the first five pieces are to be made across 2026 and 2027, with Pattern Pieces and Reliquary first because they fix the measurements the others are built to; Lineup begins with the first cast in 2026 and completes in 2033, so the room can be shown with one cast on the rail and six empty hangers, and grows each year. Alongside the sculpture, a small number of wearable garments in the same materials will be made to measure for queer and trans sitters. Each will be worn once, at a fitting or at the opening, and photographed on its sitter; the garment then hangs beside that photograph for the rest of the show, so the room holds both the fitting that fails and the fitting that doesn't.
About
Lucifex is Elle Berman, a trans woman making sculpture in leather and latex in Dublin.
The work comes out of what it is like to be queer and trans and finding it hard. Not hard in the abstract: hard in the fitting room, on the measuring tape, in the garment that was made for a body that isn't yours, in the body that keeps changing and the clothes that don't. The sculptures are a way of taking those moments and making them into objects that can be looked at steadily, handled with care and shown to other people.
The struggle is only half of it. Alongside the sculpture, Elle makes garments in leather, latex and cloth that are meant to be worn, and that celebrate queer bodies as they are: cut to the person in front of her rather than to a standard block, and made to be seen in. The sculptures hold the difficulty still so it can be looked at. The garments are what happens when the fitting goes right.
Leather and latex were a deliberate choice. They are the two materials queer culture has used for a century to dress bodies that refuse to be dressed the usual way, and they behave in opposite ways: one takes the body perfectly and forgets it, the other is rough and keeps whatever shape it was given. That turned out to be a good description of transition, so the materials became the subject as well as the medium.
The practice is slow and hand-made. Everything is cut, stitched, moulded and glued by Elle in the studio, and the pieces are meant to show the time that went into them. Lineup, one latex cast a year for seven years, is the long project everything else sits around.
Artist statement
My work asks what a body is allowed to be, and who gets to decide.
I am queer and trans, and the practice starts there: in the fitting room, on the measuring tape, in clothes made for a body that is not mine, in a body that keeps changing and a world that wants it to settle. Gender, body image, fashion and desire are not four themes I chose. They are the four places where a body is measured against a standard and found to be the wrong shape. The work is an exploration of that measuring: how a body gets read, dressed, corrected and misread, and what it might mean to refuse the correction and still be seen.
The method is tailoring turned against itself. Tailoring is the craft of making a body fit a pattern, so I take patterns from real people, mine and others', and then refuse to make the garment the pattern implies. Seams stay open. Hardware holds together halves that don't match. A corset is built for a shape no one has. A body is drafted as pattern pieces and only one side is cut. Each piece holds a moment of being fitted still, so it can be looked at steadily instead of endured.
Right now the materials are leather and latex, because they are the two skins queer culture has used for a century to dress bodies that refuse to be dressed the usual way, and because they disagree about what a body is. Latex takes every contour perfectly and forgets it the moment you step out. Leather is rough, scarred, someone else's skin, and keeps whatever shape it is given for decades. One is present tense, the other is memory, and that turned out to be a fair description of transition. So for now they are the vocabulary. The questions came first and will outlast them.
I am not interested in shock. The work is slow and the craft is meant to be visible: saddle stitching, hand-cut edges left raw, latex seams glued and polished until the joins vanish. Care is the argument. A body that has been handled this carefully is hard to dismiss.
This could be mine, and this was never for me.
The pieces sit between the dress form and the figure. Some are made to be worn. Some are built to the exact measurements of a person and cannot be entered at all. Alongside them I make garments that are simply meant to fit, and to celebrate the bodies they fit. The sculptures are the questions. The garments are one answer.
Artistic vision
Fashion already does the thing sculpture claims to do: it decides what a body is allowed to look like, then manufactures that body at scale. I want to work at the point where the garment and the figure become the same object, and ask who drew the pattern.
Over the next few years the work moves in three directions. First, scale: freestanding figures at and above life size, built from multiple people's measurements so no single body is being represented. Second, time: Lineup, one cast of my own body a year for seven years, so that transition, ageing, weight and surgery appear as a series rather than a before and after. Third, the wearable work moves out of the gallery and onto bodies at events, documented and brought back as objects that have been used.
The aim is a body of work where fetish materials are not a provocation but a vocabulary. Leather and latex have carried queer desire, discipline and self-invention for a century. I want the sculptures to speak that vocabulary fluently and to say something new in it about gender and about being looked at.
The themes every piece pulls on
Patterns are drafted for two bodies. Mine are taken from one at a time, with no block to grade from. The work asks what a tailored shape is when the standard is removed.
Latex shows the body as it is, flawless, for as long as you are inside it. Leather keeps the shape of what was done to it. Putting them side by side puts the body and its edit in the same room.
Every piece is built with garment techniques: pattern, seam, closure, finish. The sculptures are read as clothes first, which is where their authority comes from.
Leather and latex carry a history of queer desire and play. The work uses that charge openly, treating it as a shared language rather than a secret.
Theoretical ground
Rough and smooth is not only a difference in material. It is the difference between a surface that shows its history and one that refuses to.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in Touching Feeling, draws on Renu Bora's distinction between texture and texxture: the second spelling is for a surface that carries the visible record of how it was made and handled, the first for a surface so smooth that its making is hidden. Leather is texxture. Every scar, brand and stretch mark on the hide is a record of a life, and every tool mark I add joins it. Latex is texture in Sedgwick's first sense: a polished surface with no past, which is exactly why it reads as perfect. The pieces hold the two together so the viewer can feel what each one conceals.
Judith Butler's account of gender as a "stylized repetition of acts" with no original behind it is the other foundation. Latex is performativity made literal. It is a flawless gendered surface that exists only while a body is inside it performing, and that collapses into a formless heap the moment the performance stops. There is no latex body underneath the latex. Leather is what Butler calls sedimentation: repetition that has hardened over time into something that feels natural and permanent. Wet-moulded hide keeps a shape for decades because it was held in that shape long enough. So does a body.
There is no latex body underneath the latex.
Jack Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure gives the work permission to refuse the finished garment. The corset that never closes, the latex jacket that fails to hold the chest, the torso whose two halves don't fit: in a tailoring workshop each of these is a defect. Here failure to resolve into a legible, finished body is the point. Halberstam's "queer time" is in the work's refusal of the before-and-after story that transition is usually told through: a half body with the other half left uncut, a gaff sealed mid-use beside the garment that replaced it, seven casts that refuse to show the change between them.
José Esteban Muñoz wrote that queerness "is not yet here", a horizon rather than a possession. The latex pieces are built in that tense. A cast taken from the living body is perfect for the length of the sitting and then it is gone, and what is left on the hanger is the evidence that it was possible. Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology describes queerness as bodies and objects that fail to line up with the orientations they are given. A seam that joins two halves that were never meant to meet, held by hardware, is that failure made into a structure that stands.
The materials also carry their own queer history and I use it deliberately. Michel Foucault, speaking about leather and S/M culture in the early 1980s, described it not as the uncovering of hidden desires but as the invention of new possibilities for pleasure through the strategic use of the body. Paul B. Preciado, in Countersexual Manifesto, treats prostheses and worn objects as technologies that produce the body rather than decorate it. In that tradition a harness, a corset or a latex skin is not a costume over a true body. It is one of the ways a body gets made, and the sculptures take that claim seriously.
Definition
Queer is not a category the work belongs to. It is the thing the work does.
In everyday use "queer" has become an umbrella: a word for anyone whose gender or sexuality sits outside the expected. The work uses the word in the stricter sense it has carried since the early 1990s, when it was taken back from being an insult and sharpened into a method. Teresa de Lauretis coined "queer theory" in 1991 to name a way of thinking that refused to settle into fixed identities. David Halperin defined queer as "whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant", adding that "there is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence." Sedgwick, in Tendencies, called it the "open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances" that appears when the parts of anyone's gender or sexuality "aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically".
That is the definition the sculptures work to. A corset is a piece of shapewear, an item of fetish gear, a historical costume and an instrument of discipline, and Corset for a Person Who Doesn't Want One declines to be only one of those. A half body pattern is a tailor's draft and a portrait and a set of instructions for a body that does not exist yet. Leather is upholstery, saddlery, a jacket and a harness. None of the pieces can be made to mean one thing, and the hardware that holds them together is there to keep the different meanings in the same object rather than resolve them.
Judith Butler argued in "Critically Queer" that the word only keeps its force if it is "never fully owned", always being redeployed and twisted away from its previous use. The work takes that as a working rule. Queer here describes the artist, and it also describes the objects. In the objects it is a refusal, built into each object, to let a body, a garment or a material settle into the shape it is expected to hold.
An identity without an essence. A garment without a body. A pattern for someone who is not yet here.
Texts the work is in conversation with
Dates are first publication. Add or remove as the practice develops.
Two skins that disagree
Every piece is built on the gap between these two materials. Leather is worked wet over a cast, dries rough and uneven, and keeps that form permanently. Latex is brushed or stretched over the living body, polished to a perfect gloss, and slumps the instant it is taken off.
Garments in leather, latex and cloth are made to measure from a fitting in the studio, cut to you and no one else. Allow eight to twelve weeks. Sculptural commissions and loans for exhibition by conversation.
Elsewhere