Slow Grown Skin explores the body in relation to transition. The project is a collaboration between Hartenjager and sculptor Nik Esmeijers, whose snail creature emerged from his experience as a trans man navigating the prolonged waiting list for hormone therapy. The sculpture embodies the sensation of being suspended in time: a body longing for transformation, yet held in a state of enforced stillness. This slowness also reflects the reality that trans bodies exist within environments where visibility is not inherently safe. At a time when trans lives are increasingly subjected to political and social scrutiny, the body becomes something that must continuously negotiate its relationship with the world around it. As a simultaneous hermaphroditic species, the snail carries both male and female reproductive characteristics. We deliberately engage with the historical weight of the term hermaphrodite, acknowledging its use as a derogatory label imposed on transgender and intersex people. Within Slow Grown Skin, this biological ambiguity is reclaimed as resilience, adaptation and continual becoming.

The analogue photographs are shot on 35mm film and chemically altered during development using household substances such as bleach. Rather than relying on digital manipulation, the images are physically transformed, allowing the material itself to become an active part of the work. Its unpredictable mutations mirror a body undergoing transformation while resisting complete control.

The digital photographs extend the series into a more monstrous and alien interpretation of the queer body. Berries recur as bodily forms: translucent white currants resemble embryos, while others become growths, mutations or unfamiliar organs. This otherness is both embraced and resisted. The creature-like body becomes a space for queer ambiguity while carrying the dysphoria, frustration and anger of inhabiting a body still waiting for desired change. Slow Grown Skin ultimately resists a fixed before-and-after narrative. The body remains unstable: growing, resisting and imagining itself otherwise, caught between the body one inhabits, the body one desires, and the forces that determine when change becomes possible