Sharing trans histories through the Weston Loan Programme
With help from Art Fund and the Garfield Weston Foundation, all the parts of a powerful work by Claye Bowler are reunited at Queer Britain this autumn.
A version of this article first appeared in the autumn 2025 issue of Art Quarterly, the membership magazine of Art Fund.
A new exhibition at Queer Britain in London this autumn explores artist Claye Bowler’s seven-year journey to obtain gender-affirming surgery. Titled ‘Top’, the show takes the form of a large-scale installation of the same name comprising sculpture, and other artworks and artefacts, which was first shown at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds in 2022, before certain works from the installation then entered different UK collections. Thanks to a grant from the Weston Loan Programme with Art Fund, the complete installation has now been brought back together for the first time for this showing.
Bowler has described Top as a ‘celebration of being trans and overcoming struggle’. To document his experience, he has gathered together latex and plaster casts of his upper body before and during the process of top surgery (an operation to remove chest or breast tissue), together with photographs, videos, paintings, drawings and letters. The work is presented as if it were in a museum archive, with objects displayed in wooden storage crates and drawers on metal shelving racks.
This language of museum storage is intended by the artist as a reference to the way that archives are typically hidden from public view in the same way that queer and trans lives have also historically been hidden or suppressed, both by society and museums. It is also a language that draws on Bowler’s experiences in his former job as an assistant collection registrar at Tate and current role as registrar and collection manager at the Museum of Transology, an organisation dedicated to documenting the lives of trans, non-binary and intersex people.
For the show’s curator, Jennifer Shearman, head of programme and collection at Queer Britain, putting Top back on display marks an important opportunity for the museum to uncover these hidden histories. ‘Visitors are encountering an installation that includes hundreds of individual objects that all speak to the experience of trans healthcare in the UK,’ she says. ‘It’s very much a personal documentation, with the drawers displaying photographs and drawings that contain references to Bowler’s surgical procedure.’ There are also several videos of the artist included in the work.
Following the initial display of Top at the Henry Moore Institute, one part of the installation was acquired by the Arts Council Collection and another by the Wellcome Collection. The rest remains in the ownership of the artist. To bring these parts together for the new exhibition, Queer Britain applied for a grant from the Weston Loan Programme, created by the Garfield Weston Foundation and Art Fund in 2017 to enable works from national or major collections to travel on loan to smaller museums and galleries across the UK. ‘That is something that is complex for a small museum to do,’ explains Shearman. ‘This work is highly relevant to our project and without the Weston Loan Programme we might not have been able to bring it all back together.’
The grant has been used to transport part of the work from Yorkshire and install it, as well as contributing towards the promotion of the show. ‘We’re a fairly new project,’ Shearman says of Queer Britain, which is the nation’s first LGBTQ+ museum. ‘We started as a charity in 2019 and opened as a bricks and mortar museum in 2022. We get about 30,000 visitors a year, but we’re keen to extend our reach and make sure people are aware of us.’
Alongside Top, visitors to the museum this autumn will also be able to see ‘We Are Queer Britain’, a display of objects selected from the permanent collection, as well as loans including a watercolour by Duncan Grant lent by the Charleston Trust. An additional display presents loans from the Museum of Transology (housed at the Bishopsgate Institute in London), where the collection numbers more than 1,150 objects labelled and archived by trans, non-binary and intersex people in their own words.
The display of Top comes at a time when trans people are experiencing a high degree of prejudice, so one of the aims of the exhibition is to provide a place of understanding, awareness and celebration. ‘We present contemporary and historic stories that maybe haven’t been heard or had fair representation,’ explains Shearman. ‘This exhibition is part of ensuring that we are supporting artists and members from across the LGBTQ+ community and to show that, as an organisation, we stand firmly with the trans community. There will always be a place for trans people at Queer Britain to have their stories told and presented.’
Claye Bowler: Top at Queer Britain in London, 10 September to 23 November. Pay-what-you-can donation, 10% off in shop with National Art Pass.