In autumn 2010, I took part in an exhibition at Hampstead Town Hall organized by GFEST, a platform for LGBTQ artists, organizations, and venues to promote LGBT and queer arts in London. When I met with Julie Lomax, who was at the time the head of visual arts for the Arts Council in London and one of the selectors for the show, we discussed how the work was selected. Some was chosen for being powerfully moving, some for being visually aggressive and impossible to ignore, and some for being downright perplexing. Mine was chosen for this last reason. And in that moment, I felt inclined to agree. “The Stags in Drag (the nature of beauty)” was made in an instinctive way, based on a number of aesthetic choices. By placing together different media and visual imagery, I aimed to create a visual collision—something both familiar and unknown, questioning beauty itself. When completed I began to try and unpick what and why I had made in this piece, a collage on the back of a wooden door with a glorious glittery herd of decorated deer parading across the work. I became interested in the idea of stags, usually an archetypal symbol of masculinity, as incredible visions of loveliness and beauty. Within nature it is often the males that are predisposed to “beauty,” outshining their female counterparts, and will often, and certainly in the case of deer, further decorate themselves in order to attract mates and assert their position within a hierarchy. This is something that is reflected in humanity, but within entirely different social constructs of masculinity and femininity. The nude female form with the head of the stag represents a grotesque, gorgeous