To The Hands That Held Before Me is an installation created for CCA Derry/Londonderry's exhibtion URGENCIES. The work explores past, current, and future forms of queer acts of resistance expressed through typographic design. 

This installation came out of a response from studying archival material across Ireland, with a special focus on Northern Ireland. When trying to articulate my desire to work with queer archives I wrote that I wish to form a bond, to think of all the other hands that held it, created it, thought and screamed it…To the hands that held before me. The work has a double meaning, on one hand, it responds to those who physically held hands before me whether in love, friendship or protest, and on the other hand (and its original context) was to refer to the hands that physically produced and held the archival material that I was examining.

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While scrounging in libraries for partial fragments of queer history and literary heritage, the video work follows a personal journey of investigation that often highlights the bleaker side of queer history that bears witness to the magnitude of queer loss, social inquiry, and exclusion.