En bra gylf / Hyvä sepalus / A good fly

Even though they mostly work in graphite or ink on paper, Edith Hammar’s oeuvre is anything but black and white. Their award-winning graphic novels, Homo Line (2020) and Portal (2022) brings to life a non-binary, queer and inclusive parallel universe where the boundaries between reality and fantasy are often blurred and fluid. Hammar belongs to a growing group of international contemporary artists who are creating work that challenges the all-too-narrow, heteronormative (and not seldom white-dominated) depictions of love (and sex) found across art history. Artists like Hammar are shattering the conception that love looks, or behaves in, a certain way, whilst also creating greater visibility for the LGBTQ+ community in the process.

Their portrayals of love —not just amorous couples, but also gatherings of friends and expressions of self-love and desire— are not only art historically important, but also much needed gestures of support for the many young people who will follow in their footsteps (honoring trailblazers like Tom of Finland [Touko Laaksonen, 1920 – 1991]) in the process. Hammar, who describes themselves as “a visual artist whose most important tools are graphite and ink”, have stated: “I am almost always fantasizing about cute get-togethers, entering different dimensions, queer alternative realities. Creating and drawing these kinds of images is a way for me to realize queer desires and dreams.”

Like their graphic novels Hammar’s, often-large-scale, drawings give the viewer an opportunity to enjoy the intimate settings of the compositions, where real-life situations, or personal fantasies, have been transferred onto paper. Sometimes with an emphasis on fetish-like symbols (zippers, boots, earrings etc.), these drawings often convey vague undertones of an erotic nature. The artist’s web page (elmhammar.com) states:

Hammar’s work is a platform for the transgressive and erotic. A drawing is the perfect middle ground between fantasy and action. Objects like zippers, boots, earrings and gardening tools are loaded with tension in Hammar’s art practice. Hammar enhances the bulkiness of the jeans fly and oversized sweat drops or tears are dripping down the arms of the characters who are looking back at the viewer.

The quote above gives us clues about how to decipher works like A good fly (where the ambiguous title refers to a zipper in a pair of trousers). The gender-neutral figure assumes almost monumental proportions where it threatens to burst the picture surface and spill over the edges of the sheet. The scale of the figure, and the way it is rendered bestows the composition with a calm sense of dignity. The sense of monumentality is reinforced by a hint of a so-called frog perspective, in which the viewer psychologically assumes a subordinate position, in front of the excessively large feet (themselves symbols of fetishism?), when meeting the gaze of the depicted model. All of the above generates an undefined, if vaguely erotic, tension in which the viewer’s gaze is invariably drawn to the zipper (or “good fly”) at the center of the composition, where the model generously and confidently parts their legs in what is commonly, and pejoratively, referred to as a “manspreading”.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation