H Boone

Working with any material they can get their hands on, Boone’s paintings, sculptures and videos explore connections between gender, discomfort, and play. Celebrating the glitch, the artist manipulates their digital body like clay, mirroring the metamorphic nature of being transgender. 3D Printing has become a door for Boone to navigate the membrane between digital and physical.

Boone grew up in Midcoast, Maine and received their Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the Maine College of Art in 2016. They had their first solo exhibition, Gendered Fluid, at New System Exhibitions in Portland, ME in 2021. The artist recently moved to Buffalo, NY, and has plans to pursue a graduate degree in Toronto.

Artist Statement

I use an interdisciplinary practice to explore queer world-building and search for where I exist outside the gender binary. Sculpture, painting, and video become blurred; my process fluctuates between digital and physical to create each piece. I create 3D models through digital sculpting in tandem with scanning my own body. My shape is transformed as I please through digital production: emulating, tweaking, hitting ctrl-z. With 3D printing, I explore making the utopic body limitless. My creations can be squirted out into the physical world. The result is a colorful, carnivalesque chimera; sickening but possibly arousing. Mix and match taken to the extreme, bodies are glitched into impossible, fleshy compositions; parts are added, duplicated, removed.

Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism has given me a framework to explore gender and the physical body through the lense of a computer glitch. If a glitch is a computer misbehaving, gender nonconformity is a malfunction of the binary. Unlike a computer, the gender binary does not need to function properly. The membrane that separates digital from physical reality grows thin.

“Skin is a container. It is a peel that contains and cradles wildness. It gives shape to
bodies. A break, tear, rupture, or cut in skin opens a portal and passageway. Here, too, is
both a world and a wound. . . .

Most literally within a technological arc, the presence of a glitch makes the ‘digital skin’ visible, reminding us of the fallibility of the machine and a presence of its hardware, revealing its edges and seams. We rely on the error of glitches to show us the machinic limitations and in turn, to get a sense of where we might hack further in pointed undoing. Through a more figurative lens, the presence of error offline—as an unrecognizable body,
a body without a name—reveals cracks in the seemingly glossy narrative of the absolute
fixity of gender binary, exposing it as a carefully constructed fiction.” [1]

My work misbehaves, exposes itself. I intentionally glitch and reconstruct my form to stretch the limitation of what it means to have a gendered body. Body horror competes with playful color and pattern to create a duality that reflects the uncertainty of existing and presenting as queer. Resisting an either/or. Taking pride in having a monstrous body. A trans body, constantly in flux. In my work, body parts and duplicates crash together and intersect. I work unifying the physical trans human and the digital transhuman. A duality of the hoped-for transcendence of gender binary/materiality itself.

Profile photograph by Belle Fall.

[1] Russell, L., 2020. Glitch Feminism. Verso, pp.101-102.