IN SEARCH FOR A NEW KIND OF TENDERNESS
A few days after our shoot at his studio in Schaarbeek with Sander, Tom joins me on my terrace in Molenbeek for breakfast and to discuss his work, identity, and the deeply personal themes that shape his artistic practice. We have been collaborating on various occasions for the past 10 years, so it’s nice to take stock of how his practice is developing - especially considering the intuitive nature of our relationship.
TOM HALLET creates installations combining drawings and sculptures made with latex, earth, and plants. He tells stories about love and identity, violence and loss, representation, and power dynamics through a unique visual language that plays with attraction, mystery, and repulsion. His meticulously detailed drawings take the form of letters dedicated to lovers, family members, queer icons, martyrs, and those who oppress them. What specifically draws me to his work, is how his unsettling sceneries manage to depict trauma whilst simultaneously offering a sense of regeneration. It resonates with how we are shaped by the wrongdoings inflicted upon us in our lives, navigating the need for standing up for ourselves whilst also being in a constant search for a way of softening our edges, for a new kind of tenderness.
Family takes up significant space in your work, as you reference family secrets and inherited trauma, but also incorporate notions such as chosen family and kinship. Can you explain how this translates into your exploration of sexuality, desires and your research on queerness?
Indeed, I’m fascinated with how family dynamics shape and define a person, especially considering the arbitrariness and coincidental nature of how we come into this life: by two people copulating. Every family carries trauma, and apparently such wounds need about three generations to be healed, that is: if everyone in the family structure is doing their part to learn from and work through the trauma. That being said, my family also carries a history, and I’m part of the first generation that inherited that weight. Because of this, there was an exceptional abundance of love in my family, which in a way almost felt like a survival strategy. As if the urgency to heal was met by loving each other very deeply and generously. Growing up in that kind of environment, it was confusing to find out that the outside world wasn’t so receptive to me, for my own experience of love and sexuality. I was very sensitive, and people started calling me gay or were emasculating me already at a very young age, before I even had a self-conscious understanding of myself. Being labelled like that, it felt like my life was predefined and laid out for me. Which then makes it even more alienating to not be accepted for who you are and what you like. That’s when the notion of “perversion” creeps in. The imposed idea of feeling perverted, of being considered a pervert.
Has this fraught process of coming-of-age, of coming-into-consciousness and eventually of coming-out had any influence on you becoming an artist?
Definitely. I’ve always been creative: I dreamt intensely, I read a lot and I was drawing all the time as a kid. This was very coherent with the image people had of me. Of me being ‘different’. When I got older, going from child to adolescent and later on, I settled into this warped social identity that was partly constructed by people’s expectations of me, which was associated with these notions of deviance mentioned earlier. Art became instrumental in that aspect. It became my in-between space, a screen between me and the outside world, a safe context in which I could explore and get to know myself. In a way, it’s my shadow world as well as my true home.
With so many outside assumptions, do you feel the need to assert your own voice—both for yourself and towards others? How is this in-between space evolving as you grow older, perhaps coming at peace with who you are as a person and an artist?
I do. In my earlier work, I dealt more with my own personal narrative. “If this is how you see me, then have a look at what I’m making now, see how I grew”. I was also trying to carve out a place for myself in a predominantly heterosexual art world. But with that, in order to understand my work, people had to understand my sexuality. The work itself became too intertwined with the notion of being gay.. I actually grew tired of being so descriptive at all times, explaining my identity alongside my work, justifying myself, wanting to be accepted by specific groups of people.
I have to say there was a big moment when Marnie Slater (a Brussels-based visual artist and writer, who works with feminist and queer her/their/histories and archives) came to see my work while I was in residence at Morpho in Antwerp, and didn’t understand why I was trying so hard to communicate something that was so very obvious and evident. I panicked. I had been so occupied explaining myself that I didn’t know what else my work was about. And so a new challenge arose: of having to communicate with my own queer community. My work did change drastically in that moment.
My practice is still self-referential in a way, because I still work with what people project onto me, but I started doing more research. Broadening my scope to move beyond the perimeter of my personal family history, my own feelings and love life. This brought me to other people’s stories and to historical moments and occurrences. I now position myself in the world around me. I look at the violence prevailing in our society, at how the world treats queer people, confronting myself with that collective trauma, but also with survival and regeneration.
Though already before that, about 5 years ago, I remember visiting your spectacular exhibition “Sincerely yours”, organised with your curatorial platform Soil Collective in your own apartment in Brussels? This was also when drawing made its way back into your practice and your style changed a lot. The work at that show was so different from the aesthetics and visual language you worked with before. Much less abstract.
At school, teachers advised me to stay away from figurative drawing, for it would be too “illustrative”. Because it was my main tool, I resorted to writing texts to envisage the worlds I wasn’t allowed to draw. These texts became scripts of installations and a lot of video work. I literally stopped drawing for years, until one day, it just came back. I sat myself down, and drew fairies who are playing with their clitoris whilst looking at you, eerie little characters caressing themselves, lush plant-life and fur-like surfaces. Very figurative, very dramatic. Sincerely yours was fundamental as it introduced all these ingredients I still work with today: I still draw and make estranging body bags in latex.
Of course it’s always evolving, as I become more at ease with the materials. I now drape and fold, I play around in the studio, allow things to come into being gradually and by chance. The fact that I’m not a very technical person is a big part of this intuitive approach. Drawing is inherently simple and direct. Same goes for latex, it’s a rather straight-forward material to work with, and I learned by doing. I love how it’s sexual, carnal, animalistic, how it degrades, how it smells, the fact that it rots and can be reused. In the past years I have experimented more with creating immersive environments, using charcoal to cover walls, bundles of branches to create works that also function as scenography, and I want to be more specific with the plants I work with. Tears of Job for instance are symbolic: you can pierce through the seeds and they will remain fertile. I think that’s beautiful, that no matter how violent you are to marginalise or discard something, that it will remain alive.
Your exhibitions appear as a sort of utopia, where the persecuted are inhabiting their own universes, living according to their own codes. Seduction and repulsion go hand in hand. How do you relate that to the world we’re in today?
In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Esteban Muñoz, ‘queerness’ itself is being coined as a utopian word. Representing everything that doesn’t wish to comply, to conform, to live up to a norm of a binary society. I’m very drawn to the notion of fluidity, where everything is constantly “makeable”, constantly shifting. Things being in flux are tricky to pin down, which is also what makes queerness so threatening to many people. It speaks of radical liberty.
My work behaves fluidly, with details that shift upon closer inspection—what seems like an eye may reveal itself as a hole or an anus; a grassy field might turn into skin or fur; inscriptions resemble scars; a body bag might as well be a decapitated head. The labour-intensive nature of my work often draws spectators in, and the longer they observe, the more these unsettling elements emerge. It’s a way to talk about the omnipresence of violence. Seduction is an effective first step, it allows me to invite viewers into a parallel universe that eventually challenges them to question themselves.
We spoke before about the “theater of violence”, how we’re submerged by it, how it’s constantly on show. What do you aspire to contribute by portraying violence and regeneration?
The signifiers of violence are crucial in my practice. I want to address both the subtlety as well as the extreme outbursts of violence so prevalent in our world. As I mentioned, I was lucky to grow up in a very warm and open-minded family. But even then, my parents would comment on the way I walked for example. A small sneer. Little tests you get while growing up, people trying to trick you in conforming. Innocent but not-so-innocent remarks that shape you along the way. But I also look at the tragic suffering of people who came to be martyrs in the queer community. For my show at MuHKA Antwerp, I created a wooden structure echoing the fence onto which Matthew Shepard was tied and tortured, who died following the hate crime in 1998.
I let bodies and nature collide, thinking about the souls of the oppressed buried in the earth. Even when people are massacred, they don’t just vanish. They decompose, feed and fertilise our soil. New life grows from them. For that show in my apartment, I had actually written a text about kids going to play in the forest. Around them they hear this sneaky voices, whispering and laughing. To me, the spirits of the oppressed live through the oxygen we breathe, through the water that we drink. They’re still there. An act of reversal is also at play. My latex sculptures for instance, which appear like corpses, always carry the initials of the names of perpetrators of violence. The first time I made one, weeds in the soil made plants grow from them. I suddenly saw them as not being buried, but as something from which new life can emerge.
I feel that myth-making is prevalent in your work though, and in doing so you mix fact with fiction, history with fairytales. There is also a certain genealogy you build on, referencing existing martyrs, victims and survivors from distant and recent pasts, and having them encountering imagined creatures.
I grew up in an atheist household, so my spirituality is something I’ve crafted myself. For me, it’s rooted in escapism. I’m drawn to animism, magical thinking, and ancestry rather than traditional beliefs. It’s not something I consciously analyze, but magic and fantasy have always been a part of my life and work. I’m fascinated by conjuring up fantasy worlds, letting my imagination run wild, and creating universes where the usual rules, norms, and codes don’t apply. And yes, a genealogy of queerness is key for me, as I do feel a connection with my community, beyond time and space.
What's also worth noting, is how I’m intrigued by the hypocrisy within Christianity, particularly in how it uses propaganda and culture to instrumentalize (homo-)eroticism. Think, for example, of Saint Sebastian—completely in ecstasy, pierced by arrows, wearing nothing but a small cloth. That kind of orgasmic energy finds its way into my work too, in a way that’s almost pre-Raphaelite. But I always like to disrupt that moment of immersion. For instance, the dead birds I place seemingly at random in my installations act as a jolt back to reality.
Ultimately, it’s about playing with the senses, immersing the viewer in these alternate worlds, and then pulling them back out again.
And like that, you also trick your audience.
I think we’re all ‘tricksters’. A queer person is seen as a ‘trickster’, someone who wants to convince other people into our lifestyles. It’s completely absurd, but I embrace that cliché in my work. My titles reference fairy tales: I’m having my characters literally originate from fairies. The origin of all of this is ultimately queer. We’re from nature. Nature isn’t binary. I’m not trying to convince anyone, I’m just observing, contextualising, and hopefully enchanting along the way.
The exhibition Heavy Air by Tom Hallet and Antonia Brown is on view until January 12th, 2025, at Netwerk Aalst
Interview by Evelyn Simons
Photography by Sander Houthuys