Adam Atkinson - Perfect Form

Adam Atkinson
Perfect Form
2026
Basswood, acrylic
32"H x 20"W x 16"D

About Adam Atkinson

Adam Atkinson’s practice explores masculinity and queer identity through sculpture, adornment, and functional objects that blur distinctions between utility, ornament, and self-representation. Across the works presented in this exhibition—including three wearable cherry wood pieces, a life-sized maple wood hand, and an autobiographical basswood bust—the body becomes both subject and medium. The artist’s body works upon wood that repeatedly returns to them as another body: in the form of his hand, intestines and an almost life-sized replica of himself from the lower crotch upward. Here, making becomes a reciprocal encounter in which identity is not simply represented through wood but literally negotiated with and through it.

The wearable pieces are among the exhibition’s most intimate works. Their soft, dark pink hue reinforces the bodily associations of the bulbous, fleshy forms that recur throughout Atkinson’s work, where inside often becomes placed outside. Internal bodily forms evoking intestinal folds; anal openings, and other visceral structures are all transformed into external, wearable objects. Each piece begins as a hand-carved form and is then repeatedly sanded to produce a smooth, tactile surface while preserving the expressive grain of the wood. Leather straps are a practical addition to enable the pieces to be worn but also serve to invoke the visual language of kink aesthetics and queer leather subcultures. Rather than simply attaching the object to the body, these sculptures now become a mechanism through which the body is extended and reimagined.