Saturn Akin is a Glasgow-based multidisciplinary artist, working across performance, adornment making, 3D, and photography. Their art practice revolves around the conjuration of their own identity (NB/Trans) and is driven by the creation, deconstruction, and reconstruction of adornments, 3D objects and still-lifes. Through this intricate and generative process, Saturn Akin explores themes of transness, body signal technology, and mutualism/mutability within a Queer Ecological framework. Narration plays pivotal roles in Saturn Akin’s (3D) object-making process. Saturn Akin draws inspiration from renowned black and non-black feminist and transgender science-fiction authors like Octavia Butler, Pamela Sargent, and Bogi Takács. The incorporation of non-human life forms in their objects and adornments underscores the concept of mutualism and envisions a Queer future rooted in transspecies relationships.

Whether drawing inspiration from technology or non-human entities, each object acts as an amulet.; an amulet holds the ability of transmutation and explores the notion of ‘becoming with — ’. The usage of 3D (software, virtual, or printed) allows Saturn Akin to incorporate non-human referents without the need for physical encounters or a traditional “cabinet of curiosity”. This conceptual (technological) distancing permits them to “keep things alive by rejecting mastery or dominance”.

This residency is made possible with kind support from The Bridge Awards.