Lou Lou Sainsbury

Gasworks presents the first solo exhibition in London by Margate and Rotterdam-based artist Lou Lou Sainsbury. Identifying as a time traveller, Sainsbury works across film and performance, poetry and drawing, installation and textiles. Her work unwrites and rewrites our planet’s natural history, putting forward alternate mythologies informed by queer and ecological activisms.

Sainsbury’s practice is often driven by collaboration within a care network of friends. Her writings and performances map a constellation of interspecies encounters with living beings in constant transformation, affirming her love for aliens and vampires, mystics and saints, impossible births and otherworldly forces, bodies that seep out and words that crack open.

At Gasworks, Sainsbury presents a new body of work that seeks to reimagine transgender experience beyond the limiting language of medicalisation, rewriting its histories into a cosmic poetics of trans sensuality, relation and desire.

The exhibition revolves around Sainsbury’s descending notes (2022), a collaborative performance film that explores transness as a form of dissonance and resonance. It takes inspiration from Donny Hathaway’s heartfelt rendition of A Song for You, whose lyrics are punctuated by a discordant progression of piano notes: “If my words don’t come together, listen to the melody ‘cause my love is in there hiding… I love you in a place where there's no space or time.”

Featuring collaborations with artists Raffia Li and Ada M. Patterson, the film is a trans-erotic love story between three “transing beings” unfolding across time and space, from early Christian mysticism to future alien intimacies, while being grounded in tangible experiences of tenderness, solidarity and grief within Sainsbury’s friendships and everyday life.

In the main gallery, Sainsbury presents a large-scale stained-glass installation. Each of its panels features geometric patterns dotted with dried flowers, cigarette butts and miscellaneous debris which are trapped in a thick layer of dripping honey like insects on amber. Dividing the space, this installation’s varying levels of translucency point towards a trans gaze while being testament to the artist’s questioning of visibility and representation.

The show is punctuated by text-based works taking over the exhibition space. Words become flesh on the gallery walls, swelling like religious stigmata. Produced in collaboration with Kari Rosenfeld, the long poem The Law of Desire Is Fascist (2022) is performed by queer elder poet Jo Mariner as a sound work, while also reinterpreted as a cosmic landscape of decaying cupcakes.

Sainsbury understands writing as a transformative practice—a form of somatic experimentation that operates on one's body at a molecular level, as evidenced on a photographic portrait of the artist with a spiralling line of oestradiol gel on her naked arm.

Closing the exhibition is an antique cabinet with personal gifts, souvenirs and used HRT wrappers, which acts as a holding place for the artist’s shared intimacy within a care network of friends, foregrounding trans experience as a collective process of making and unmaking the body, rather than an individual narrative centred on the self.

Lou Lou Sainsbury is an artist based between Margate and Rotterdam. She graduated from the MA in Art Praxis at the Dutch Art Institute in 2021. Previously she was an associate artist at Open School East in 2017, after completing her BA in Moving Image at the University of Brighton in 2016.

She has exhibited individually at Well Projects, Margate (2020). Recent performances and group exhibitions include: Whitstable Biennale (2022); Centre for Contemporary Arts, Prague (2021); Yaby and La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2020); Nottingham Contemporary; Tate Modern, London; Yaby, Madrid (all 2019); and Flat Time House, London (2018).