Production still, 2023. Digital transfer of 16mm film.

The Death of Venus is the working title of a film installation that I am currently developing for a solo exhibition in Feb-May 2026. Its central image is the mythological figure of Hermaphroditos, which originates in Ancient Greece, but was reimagined in Rome and again much later in the European Renaissance. It perhaps finds some continuity in the fear, fascination and desire provoked by trans bodies today.

I’m trying to find an artistic form that expresses the fantasy of escaping the confines of our bodies and our selves. Our bodies are racialised and gendered, defined by the looks of others. As a result they are often strange or even foreign to us, unable to ‘represent’ the complications or contradictions of our sense of our self. As someone with a biracial background I’m used to being defined by others in a way that doesn’t fit with my knowledge of myself. The gendered body is misread in even more complex ways, since sexuality is so often misread on perceptions of gender. I want to create an artwork that captures the desire to be more than what one seems to be, and to enable audiences to empathise with that experience.

The images shown on this page are ungraded stills from a test shoot in the lagoons that lie at the top of the Adriatic Sea, between Trieste and Venice. These ‘waterscapes’ are precarious, uncertain spaces, where freshwater mingles with seawater, delicate ecosystems supporting endangered species of flora and fauna. Even a slight imbalancing of the natural system that feeds them would leave them either as stagnant ponds, or inundated and incorporated into the sea. As sea levels rise, these lagoons are coming under sustained stress.

I believe that the reason myths persist over so many centuries is that they embody everyday fears and desires that cannot be otherwise articulated, and which often remain unconscious. The images of Hermaphroditos still have an intensity and power that we cannot easily explain or articulate. I want to excavate that power and to make it tangible in new ways.

© Daniel Jewesbury

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