Haylee-Louise Hollohan/ Silenced

Haylee-Louise Hollohan’s work explores her lived experience as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, how she interacts with the wider world through her individual presence, presentation and persona - experiences echoed by other trans and gender fluid individuals, which in an increasingly hostile world often have to be silenced.

T'bag

This work - T Bag - shows my handbag in a range of women's toilets, including bars, pubs, cafes, restaurants, a supermarket, a church, and a motorway service station. The handbag is a ubiquitous accessory worn by most women to carry a range of items and personal effects. While functional, it can also express the owner's personality through its design, color, shape, and more. For some people, women's toilets are a contested space, a battleground used in anti trans rhetoric, a space that can only be used to carry out basic human functions by those people pronounced female at birth. Yet as a gender fluid individual who often identifies as female I, along with my various handbags, have visited numerous 'battle grounds' or women's toilets and experienced only kindness and gentle conversation. T Bag is a work of silent protest for inclusion and acceptance within a transphobic and conflicted world.