UNDRESSING
For me, it’s all about shame. That’s not where it began– first I was trying to undress. I wondered how a person gets naked for God and strips towards truth. I thought about a song we sang in the atrium when I was little and still learning what the world thought about who I was. Singing This Little Light of Mine, we would recite:
Hide it under a bushel, NO!, I’m gonna let it shine. Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine!
This body of work became about showing my own– about covering and uncovering, hiding and revealing. Light, leaves, and other props prompted me to explore the use of the visible and invisible to conceal or reveal.
This is where skin came in. Showing skin serves much more than one single purpose. Showing skin is sometimes seen as a sign of salaciousness, but skin is also the canvas for shame: the most important medium for expressing it, and an organ at risk of catching it. Shame is an involuntary, perhaps instinctual emotion that expresses itself in somatic phenomena, seeping through to the surface of the skin in flush and flickering eyelids that indicate an intention of reconciliation. In this way, shame is not an emotion experienced in isolation; shame is an individuating but shared communication with The Other– one characterized by unevenness– with one hanging head and a pair of eyes not evenly met.
Shame has less to do with guilt than it does with fear of ignominy and dishonour. Shame is about a fear the mutual gaze going unmet–or a person being looked at and received with recoil instead of recognition. For the queer, this fear can be a perpetual one.
In (and often outside) Catholicism, the (incurable) queer is seen as an unintelligible creature out of harmony with nature and creation history. Declaring that there is no proper, positive expression of the parts of the queer she knows are essential, the Church renders her incompatible with (pro)creation, marriage, and celebratory sacraments of (comm)union. Shame is tied up with sacrifice, and these negative gifts become the only spiritually-sanctioned expressions of love for the queer. She is barred from love that is generative, and directed towards love that deteriorates.
The queer learns a person’s eyes can’t look with love if they’re directed downwards, towards the dirt. And some decide, since shame is not a perfect virtue, to try to move through the world with love, and to not let fear of disgrace keep them from receiving grace.
Aiden Loop ‘25
Advisor: Bridget Murphy Milligan
All images copyright © 2025 Aiden Loop. All rights reserved.
