AC Larsen:Spiritus Sanctus

The title of the exhibition, Spiritus Sanctus, refers to the Holy Spirit, one of the Holy Trinity in Christian theology which is conceptualised as an enduring presence, and for some is believed to act as an agent of transformation for the soul, and a force for love. For Larsen this notion of the Holy Spirit is deeply connected to their own experience of transness. The iconography of the Christian faith is woven through Larsen’s work. In their wall-based sculptures, the artist takes the motif of the votive and devotional shrine as a point of departure. Replacing the traditional candle with a bottle of Bio Oil, Larsen supplants the enduring symbol of light in Judeo-Christian tradition with a product commonly used for healing in post-operative care. In place of rosary beads, which would traditionally hang under these shrines, Larsen places a Cuban chain – another recurring motif in their work – to highlight the presence of queer bodies. Larsen intwines queer and religious iconography to reinterpret an object and site of devotion and prayer as a means to foreground the spirituality of queerness and the ritualised practices of the body. Referencing this impulse towards an innate or ‘higher’ version of oneself, the wicks placed in the Bio Oil remain perpetually unlit, while leaving open the possibility for light.

In their work entitled So Many Flowers, the artist continues their exploration of remembrance. A concrete bust, resting on a bed of dried roses, taken from the cast of Larsen’s chest following their top surgery, adopts the visual language of statues and monuments, situating transness within a canon from which it has been historically absent. As much an exploration of the iconography of memorials, the work is also an ode to their experience of gender-affirming care, one that involves both feelings of joy and grief. For Larsen these emotions do not exist as dualities, rather in a dialectic exchange. The work references the Transgender Day of Remembrance, and its rallying cry ‘give us our roses while we are still here’, and in so doing, So Many Flowers acts as a marker for time past, a measure of the act of remembrance, while situating that moment within the present.

Time operates across different registers in Larsen’s work. Referencing a line from Disney’s 1953 animation of Peter Pan – ‘to die would be an awfully big adventure’ – Larsen’s sculpture of a helium balloon attached with a VHS ribbon of the film, proposes transition as a form of death which inherently holds within it the potential for life. Within this cyclical framework, the artist considers the complexity of memory tinged by nostalgia in view of overtly toxic realities. The character of Peter Pan, the boy who never had to grow up, embodies the gendered privilege afforded to boyhood, as opposed to the figure of Wendy, whose agency is exclusively tethered to maternal care. The sculpture is left to float upwards, yet is frustrated by the gallery’s ceiling, which acts as a foil to unadulterated freedom; An Awfully Big Adventure expresses the loss of childhood innocence in its acknowledgment of gender bias, while simultaneously proffering how we might remedy the curdling of nostalgia and reality through a self-determined acceptance of new beginnings for the future.