Visiting Burn the Sheets on a sultry Wednesday afternoon was perhaps the best time to experience the exhibition. The opening night had been a bountiful moment of queer joy, bringing together every identity under one roof, yet on this average weekday moment, something rarer and perhaps even more unique took place: it offered a rare glimpse of the general public’s interaction with the trans domesticity within.

Often, trans existence is only identified as resistance, a reality writ larger than life. Yet this resilience does not define one’s being. From an external perspective, it can be hard to see past ‘transness as radical’ when even relieving oneself becomes a law-defying act. Yet as co-curator Sam Godfrey said in an opening night speech, “what happens when we want the everyday, the mundane, the rituals and minutiae of domestic life?”



Burn The Sheets offered no answers, but instead created a space within which these ideas can be explored. Here, in the House of Annetta, we got an insight into some of the lesser-seen sides of transness. The moments which take place in the quieter, more intimate space of the trans home, opened to us in a deeply personal and affecting way.

Taxonomically, the prefix trans- and domestic sit at odds. Trans goes across, beyond, or through. It is transitional, transcendent, transgressive. Domestic, on the other hand, is contained, defined by its own confines. The trans domestic is thus spatially oxymoronic, both tied to, yet free from restriction; an ephermerally tangible state of being offering up unlimited possibilities of what it could be.

It is fitting, then, that Burn the Sheets found its home in House of Annetta, an arts space located in London’s Spitalfields. Though a house by name, Annetta presents itself rather as the echo of a home, inhabiting the place between a lost past and an unwritten future. Defined by a lack of definition, it holds a liminal space, formed by its context, yet not bound to it.



Located in the former residence of activist architect Annetta Pedretti, the gallery occupies the now-gutted remnants of her home. Old wallpaper still sticks to the wall, peeling in the corners, with bare brick and crumbling masonry peeking through. Converting what was a semi-derelict three-century-old townhouse into an arts space was presumably no easy task, and Burn the Sheets had to work within the confines that arise with such an old building, adapting itself to a largely unchangeable environment.

This might seem restrictive when installing a show, but queer expression is often formed by confinement, which counterintuitively enables it to flourish. Things that might present themselves as an impasse to many become of objects of queer intrigue, provoking novel and creative solutions.

On the opening night, co-curator, exhibition designer, and artist Marf Summers spoke about how changing the space to suit the show was about creating a backdrop that no one really clocks. In this vein, Burn the Sheets became a trans trompe l’œil of semi-passing patterns designed to both highlight and hide the space’s less typically desirable features. Textures and designs taken from around the house were reproduced on fabric, covering the plywood install. Light tracks were g-clamped to beams, and zip-ties held artworks in place.



For Sam Godfrey, the challenges of adapting an ill-fitting space to their work also offered the opportunity to express their ingenuity. Sam’s work is part of their practice-based PhD from Exeter University, currently titled Creeping as Trans Creative Methodology – though, as this implies, the title has been subject to change. Their art warps and wefts between genres, with their piece at Annetta, titled three familiar waters (2024), cloaking a corner in draped layers of hand-smocked fabric.

Hidden in the depths of these smocked curtains lies a private space which can be barely peered into, both inviting yet closing off the viewer from creeping on what exists within. Sam’s interest in smocking comes from the etymology of smock, which is thought to derive from the Old Norse smjúga, or to ‘put on a garment, creep into’. This has been the basis of their research into trans domesticity, both as an act of creeping between genres, but also as something upon which society creeps.




This sense of ‘creeping’ is not confined to Sam’s corner, but feels built into the fabric of the space. House of Annetta is conventionally creepy. It embodies the theatricality of an 80s horror film with peeling wallpaper, ancient beams and crumbling brickwork. The floors are practically pitched under the weight of 300 years, creaking heavily with each step one takes.

Were a bedsheeted ghoul or low-fi monster to appear from the shadows, it would be perfectly in keeping with the ambience. In this, there is an uncanniness which envelops upon entry; a nostalgic horror which one could parallel with the 80s moral panic of gay men being a social threat, upon which today’s trans hysteria is modelled.

This uncanniness is expressed in the artworks on display, which eschew the idea of visibility as a spectacle, and refused to define any legible trans aesthetic. Though they were designed to be beheld, they shied from our gaze. Both inviting and rejecting us, they defied being domesticated. Sitting proud upon the mantle, where a family portrait might usually go, Ruby Loewe’s Anansi #2 (2020) depicted its namesake, a half-spider, half-human shapeshifting trickster prominent in West-African Folklore.




On the windowsill, somewhere between inside and outside, Rose Schmits' ceramics sat. Upon first glance, they were familiar domestic objects, but written upon the large porcelain bowl was: “EMERGENCY trans toilet”, and what could have been a flour jar was labelled “The Notorious HRT.”

At once familiar yet also unknown, Burn the Sheets created a space away from the hallowed hall of conservatism called home, where tradition and convention sit at the head of the table. This is an experience to which many sidelined communities will relate; the feeling of trying to exist in a space which has not been designed for you. Holding this space, the show quietly invited us not to capitulate to assimilation, but instead craft our own place both within and without the domestic norm; at once part of it, yet apart from it.

Not only this, but it generously welcomed others into a deeply personal space. At a time when transness is making headlines for the hubris of simply existing, and trans people are being socially and politically ostracised, Burn the Sheets opened the door to the most intimate parts of trans lives, welcoming everyone into its space. It is a gentle reminder that trans existence is just as average as any other weekday moment. That the trans domestic, no matter which form it takes, has always, and will always be a home.