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Hḗrā is a trans, HIV+ creative practitioner and activist whose work spans poetry, performance, visual arts, and installation. Their practice explores themes of gender, identity, trauma, memory, ecology, and movement, using a range of mediums to craft an experimental, biographical expression layered with abstraction. Hḗrā’s artistic journey navigates the intersections of these complex themes, offering a deep and nuanced exploration of both personal and societal narratives.
They are also a workshop facilitator working at the intersection of social change, wellbeing and queerness, creating spaces for dialogue, reflection, and collective transformation.
My practice engages questions of identity, trauma, and marginalisation through a transdisciplinary approach spanning visual art, performance, publishing, and socially engaged work. As a trans-femme artist, I draw on lived experience to examine how systemic structures—medical, political, and ecological—shape, regulate, and mark the body. Personal experience functions not as confession, but as a method for tracing how power is inscribed, administered, and resisted.
Working with photo-narrative, performance, and installation, I re-stage trauma through processes of ritual, role-play, and therapeutic methodologies such as Photo-Therapy, movement, and spatial intervention. These practices allow for forms of repair, re-authorship, and embodied agency to emerge. Across my work, I challenge fixed ideas of gender, naturalism, and authorship, foregrounding self-representation as both political strategy and care practice.
Follow y/our river is one example of this approach. The live performance explores gender transition, place-based memory, and the bureaucratic architectures that govern identity. Developed through site-specific research along East London’s River Lea, the work draws parallels between the river’s continual transformation and the embodied liminality of trans becoming. The performance is also informed by my HIV+ status, incorporating medical documentation and personal text to address visibility, stigma, and survival within institutional systems of care.
Using sewn photographic prints, body scans, archival textiles, found instruments, and field recordings, the work unfolds as a tactile and sonic ritual. Voice, sound, and gesture activate an evolving archive shaped by loss, care, and reclamation, creating a temporary space of queer resistance where transition is held, heard, and remembered.