Ashley Mauritzen

I set out to compile this book because I was sick of believing that I could control my future and the world around me. Labouring under this assumption was getting me nowhere; it was only getting me sick of myself. Six months ago then, I decided that I wasn’t going to be this way anymore. I decided to let go of the future, which was one of the best (and hardest) things I’ve ever done. Giving up on the future is not the same as giving up: it’s acknowledging that we live in a world of constant change. These days, I have as much real ‘Self’ control as I ever did before but I’m able to respond to, and even rejoice in, the daily transformations taking place in me, others and the world we live in. Transform is a testimony to the fact that the only price of letting go is letting new things in – and it’s a price worth paying.

James Cahill

Transformation is slippery, escapist, romanticised metamorphosis – Thetis changing shape in Ovid’s poem, as she eludes Peleus’ grasp, from a bird to a tree to a tigress. But it is also the unchanging object or finite event that is re-witnessed, re-remembered, or observed through time – like a statue imperceptibly changing  colour in the sunlight.

André Döbert

I am scared of transformation. I like things the way they are. I hold on to my habits and treat them like an integral part of me – like a scare you got used to. The scare might not be pretty but, somehow, it’s a part of you. I know I shouldn’t behave like that; not just because it’s a very unfashionable approach to life these days but, even worse, because avoiding transformation means avoiding progress. Nevertheless, both I and my work transform. I don’t want to know how and why; it is a process happening somewhere in my brain. I am not questioning it or investigating it because things of true beauty can only be beyond comprehension.

Rose Lewenstein

Transformation, to me, is a given and a comfort.  From subtle changes we make in everyday life to momentous transitions, it represents growth both individually and collectively.  Brunch With An Ex-Prostituting Performance Artist reflects upon how the subject’s transformation differs to that of its spectator.  Our history exists with or without documentation; its own transformations rejecting it, yet somehow relying on it too.  I see the essence of a person and their environment as being the constant through continual transformation; we’re left with what we started with.

Ann Malamah-Thomas

For me, transformation is about the potential of things, the surprises of being. The man that the child becomes. The wrinkled arm that once was smooth and firm. The sunlight that suddenly appears before the rain has even stopped. The golden leaf that whirls down from the tree right in your path. The unexpected phone call that changes your life. The chance meeting with a stranger who becomes your friend, your lover, the father of your children. Each moment of life is quivering with change, pregnant with transformation.

Matthew Smith

trans-from – noun (in mathematics and linguistics): the product of a transformation.

Adam Perchard

Any transformation is necessarily a temporal event: even an instantaneous transformation – alive to dead – is shaped by our sense of the before and the after. The easy divisions ‘before’ and ‘after’, however, often lead us to draw neat binaries where we shouldn’t.  The binaries I am particularly interested in problematising – even dissolving – are between past and present, East and West.  In a sense, these binaries are the same, for the ideological division of the globe into these hemispheres is rooted in the Western notion of a disjointed global time.  The West defines itself as progress and the East as history, as if some heavenly Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen had appeared to do a make-over on the world and we were living in its split-screened finale: East and West, before and after.

Just as the persistence of the East/West binary threatens to sink the entire globe into violent conflict, so the dissolution of the Past/Present binary offers a reprieve.  My work reads against the grain of the prevalent historiographies of East/West conflict, finding historical precedents for contemporary ideals of inter-cultural understanding between East and West, and recommending them as a passport to a peaceful global future.

Lea Becker

I believe it’s incredibly important to realise that we can all be emotionally empowered. While the things that take place around us often happen without our influence, the way we deal with them is still our choice. I also believe that people are able to change, no matter how old they are. We might think we’re all set in our ways but it’s important to take responsibility for our actions and behaviour. We must frequently rethink and possibly change our attitudes if we want to be active, positive and empowered members of our communities.

Phil Ormrod

To perservere in hope of Summer
To adapt to its broken promise
To love winter

To sleep.

To love winter
To adapt to its broken promise
To perservere in hope of Summer

Sisu by Lavinia Greenlaw

Susie Hogarth

Transformation – a traditional plot device in fairy tales, where a moment of magic precipitates a physical metamorphosis and narrative shift – takes on various forms in ‘The Girl of Fur and Bones’. Those that happen to us – ie. the bodily transformations that usher in the frightening rapture of adolescence – those transformations we can engineer for ourselves in defense, and those that may prove to be our salvation.

I wanted to explore anorexia – one of the most radical and brutal of physical transformations – as a kind of tragic spell (or ‘glamour’, in the traditional sense), which The Girl feels compelled to invoke as a kind of defense against corporeal change, sadness and loss of innocence. My starting point was fur, in the form of excessive body hair, being both one of the more unusual side-effects of anorexia nervosa and an oft-used symbol of sexual awakening or sexual danger in folklore. (The original French language Cinderella featured a distinctly vaginal fur slipper – the more clinical glass is a mistranslation – and the fur-covered wolves young girls encounter lurking in woods can be easily interpreted as a manifestation of the fear and danger of the onset of sexual maturity). The sudden sprouting of excessive body hair in anorexic sufferers has the effect of lending an animal-like sadness to the individual who emerges from the transformation – the Beast in pursuit of her Beauty – and consequently, to some extent, is an ironic counterpoint to the sexual ramifications of fur in folklore as the hair becomes a morbid suit of armour, protecting its wearer against physical maturity and its ramifications.

I like to take archetypal, universal folkloric elements and interweave them with the mundane, the urban and the everyday, allowing the former to bring out some of the magical or sublime qualities in the latter, and the latter to underpin and weight the former. This hopefully allows the language of fairytale to speak in a contemporary voice. A tower becomes the fortress of childhood against the sexual and bodily slings and arrows of adolescence. A packet of Space Raiders becomes a token of love and simple nourishment – a kind of fetish imbued with the power of kindness and empty calories. And the most vivid signs of urban peril – sirens – borrow some of the sexually dangerous symbolism of their mythological counterparts.