SURFACE TENSION (2026)

SSURFACE TENSION explores queer identity, sexual performance, and transformation through distorted photographs of silicone fetish masks. Developed for They Had Four Years (TH4Y) at Generator Projects, Dundee, the project brings fetish imagery boldly to the forefront, centring pleasure as something of both aesthetic and political importance.

The silicone masks are typically worn as part of ‘masking’ fetishism, where concealing and transforming the face becomes part of erotic play. Offering anonymity and depersonalisation, they allow the wearer to shed inhibitions, adopt new personas, and temporarily step outside a fixed sense of self.

For TH4Y, Thomson combines photography and printmaking with sculptural installation. At the centre are LIV, LANCE and EMILIA: distorted photographs of masks screenprinted onto latex, stretched over metal frames and held under tension with chains. Through the juxtaposition of organic and industrial materials, tension becomes both a material and conceptual focus- between exposure and concealment, restraint and release, body and surface.

These works are accompanied by DEMI, an inkjet photograph of a masked figure pushing their fingers through the mask’s eyeholes, and DOLLFACE, a screenprint depicting a wide-eyed mask with an uncanny innocence.

Through fetish, artifice and transformation, SURFACE TENSION considers identity and desire as sites of fluid construction. Rather than simply hiding the self, masking creates possibilities for fantasy, confidence and freedom, presenting identity as something that can be continually performed, disrupted and remade.