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# DRAW and The Body
- URL: https://www.scenemag.co.uk/draw-and-the-body/
- Published: 2026-10-04T00:40:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-04T10:50:21.000Z
- Author: Chris Jepson
- Tags: Autumn 2026 Issue, The Body Issue, Artist, ego andaluz

***Chris Jepson chats to ego andaluz in Zurich*** 

*DRAW is a three-part linocut series comprising *Break*, *Contested* and *Reach*. It looks back at the period before *ego andaluz* came out at 30, after spending three years hiding a relationship with a man from his family. Rather than focusing on the outcome, the series remains inside the uncertainty that came before it: the pressure of hiding, the internal conflict and the first cautious movement towards a new sense of self.*

![](https://www.scenemag.co.uk/content/images/2026/10/DRAW-1.jpg)

ego andaluz

**DRAW is built around your own coming out. Why express it in the body rather than telling it as a story a different way?**

Before I came out, the conflict never felt abstract. It organised my body: who I stood next to, whether I touched my partner, what I could say, even how visible I allowed myself to be in a room. For three years I was constantly editing myself in space. That is why *DRAW* is not an illustration of a coming-out story. It treats coming out as a bodily negotiation between protection and visibility. *Break*, *Contested* and *Reach* are physical states: pressure, internal collision, and the first uncertain movement towards a new sense of self.

![](https://www.scenemag.co.uk/content/images/2026/10/DRAW-IMG_2221_bearb02-1.jpg)

****Break** by [**ego andaluz*](https://www.instagram.com/egoandaluz?ref=scenemag.co.uk)

**Break shows a man pushed against a wall that isn’t really there. What is the wall?**

It is expectation made physical: family, masculinity and the heterosexual future I had learned to regard as normal. What interests me, also because of my background in sociology, is that a social norm does not need to be tangible to act on a body. It enters posture, hesitation, movement. In *Break*, the viewer cannot see the wall, but the body behaves as if it is solid. That contradiction is exactly what I wanted.

![](https://www.scenemag.co.uk/content/images/2026/10/DRAW-IMG_2221_bearb03.jpg)

****Contested** by [**ego andaluz*](https://www.instagram.com/egoandaluz?ref=scenemag.co.uk)

**Contested is two men fighting to a standstill. Who are they?**

Both represent me. But I resist reading them as a ‘true’ self fighting a ‘false’ one. The version of me who hid the relationship was not fake. He was protecting a life he was afraid to lose. Identity is negotiated under social conditions, and sometimes self-protection and self-revelation are equally powerful impulses. The two figures are evenly matched because neither is irrational. The conflict comes from the fact that they cannot coexist indefinitely.

![](https://www.scenemag.co.uk/content/images/2026/10/DRAW-IMG_2221_bearb01.jpg)

****Reach** by [**ego andaluz*](https://www.instagram.com/egoandaluz?ref=scenemag.co.uk)

**And Reach, the final image, doesn’t resolve into an embrace.**

Deliberately. I did not want hindsight to rewrite uncertainty as inevitable liberation. I made *DRAW* knowing that my family ultimately accepted me, but the person I was before coming out did not have that knowledge. So *Reach* stops at fingertips. The wall has given way and the fight has quietened, but there is no fully formed new self waiting on the other side. For me, that almost-touch is more truthful than an embrace: possibility without closure.

**Throughout Scene’s Body issue, I’m asking how bodies get read. What drew you to that question specifically?**

It is probably the central question of my practice. We rarely read a body innocently. We read gender, masculinity, power, shame, desirability. Western art has long legitimised the male nude through mythology, religion, heroism or athleticism. But if it’s unmistakable that one male body desires another, the the same anatomy can suddenly be read as provocative or ‘too sexual’. The body has not changed. The cultural code has. I am interested in that moment of reclassification, because it reveals how much of what we call natural is actually learned.

**Your figures are noticeably unguarded; nothing about them reads as softened for the viewer.**

That is very deliberate. I am not interested in softening queer bodies or queer desire to make the work easier to consume. The moment I adjust an image until nobody could possibly be uncomfortable with it, I am allowing the viewer’s expectations to dictate the work. My figures can be erotic, vain, frightened, tender, muscular, exposed or powerful. I do not think queer desire needs to be translated into a more palatable language before it can be taken seriously. I would rather take these bodies and their desires as a given and ask why certain bodies, gestures or desires still trigger such different readings.

**You work in linocut rather than photography or paint. Does the medium carry meaning here too?**

Completely. Linocut is not simply the technique I use to arrive at an image. The physical process is part of the meaning of the work. I carve with my hands and arms, work against the resistance of the lino, and print the large pieces by hand using pressure, body weight and muscle. There is force, repetition, sweat and imperfection in the process. My own body is involved from the first cut to the final impression, and it leaves its trace in the print. I am also drawn to the fact that relief printing creates an image through removal: I cut material away in order for something to become visible. And every cut is irreversible. For a series about hiding, visibility and coming out, those are not just technical characteristics. They are part of the concept.

**What did you learn about your family’s fear, rather than your own, while making this work?**

That fear was circulating between all of us, and much of it was built around a reaction that never actually happened. I had spent years imagining my family mainly as the source of risk. My mother was frightened of getting things wrong because she had never had to think about having a gay son in such a personal way. I was terrified of telling my father, and my mother was anxious about how he would react too. When I finally told him, he said that whatever happened in my life, I was his son and nothing could change his feelings for me. Afterwards I realised that I have been carrying fear around an imagined event, and while that does not make the fear insignificant, it did show me how powerfully anticipation can shape us, even when what we fear never comes to pass.

**Where does DRAW sit against your earlier work?**

Earlier work often turns the sociological lens outward: towards self-presentation, desirability, masculinity, visibility and the pressures that can exist even inside sexual freedom. *DRAW* is the first time I have turned that same lens on myself and placed my own biography ront and centre. It is more personal, but I do not see it as a retreat into autobiography. My own body is the site of questions I was already asking which made the distance between observer and subject much smaller.

*DRAW comprises Break, Contested and Reach, each a two-colour linocut on paper, 70 x 100cm, in editions of ten, signed and numbered. These and ego’s other works can be seen online at* [***egoandaluz.com***](https://www.egoandaluz.com/?ref=scenemag.co.uk)[***@egoandaluz***](https://www.instagram.com/egoandaluz?ref=scenemag.co.uk)