Title Title again Swinging in the Wind
Christopher Samuel is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice is rooted in identity and disability politics, often echoing the many facets of his lived experience. He uses urgency, humour, and poetic subversiveness within his work to make it accessible to a wider audience, allowing others to see and relate to a wider spectrum of the human experience.
For this new project commissioned by Sex with Cancer, Christopher explores the experiences of men with cancer to examine how cancer has affected their identity sexually.
Through a series of one to one conversations with men who have experienced a cancer diagnosis and treatment, Christopher gathered stories and insights into some of the unspoken impacts that cancer can have on men’s lives – What couldn’t they normally say? How had their sense of selves as men changed? What weren’t they told about?
Direct, open, honest, conversations allowed these men to reveal taboo and unspoken accounts of how their sense of mascilinity, sexual identity and sex lives were impacted, and what became important to each of them as their bodies changed.
Just as awkwardness and social norms stop many conversations about these side effects, Christopher wryly uses redaction and blocking out text from NHS pamphlets to uncover some untold stories.
With huge thanks to the seven men who were daring enough to share their stories.