‘There Is So Much Inside of Him’ is an entirely new body of work, centring painting-based pieces. It is about moving beyond boundaries. It is about dreams and anger, it is about holding and being held, about being seen, about sex, about contained violence moving through stillness, about being pinned down by queer shame and the boundaries established in adolescence and carried into adulthood. It is about pursuing desire from the inside out, and the difficulty and liberation of that. It is about freedom.

The work considers the aesthetics of experience, with visual language centring on the rural, isolated pink cottage in the Lake District where I spent years as a closeted queer teenager. The cottage was often photographed by tourists who would never consider the internal happenings as being in opposition to its romantic aesthetic.

The installation plays with ideas of control and the intensity of inner lives and past experiences. In the ‘Penis House’ sculpture, which places a large penis sculpture on a wooden sculpture of the house, I take back control, asserting my queerness in a place void of it. ‘Penis House’ is installed at kneeling height, placing power in the hands of the house and forcing all visitors to operate on a level plane with each other and with me. The painting ‘Still Nighttime, Coursing Violence’ is the only other work placed at this height, and he is watching Penis House.

Life takes place with the past in view, and the work installed at viewing height take place with ‘Penis House’ and ‘Still Nighttime’ in view too. In the works above, I establish dialogue between my own experiences and that of other queers across time. I reach out a hand in an effort to feel seen and to show what is not seen. Shameless queer desire is on display in ‘Bulge’, while ‘After Insertion’ proudly shows my bandaged arm after the insertion of a contraceptive implant. 'October 20th, Evening’, references the story of two men, Arden and Tigran, who, before jumping to their death off the Davitashen Bridge in Yerevan, Armenia, photographed themselves kissing as the sun was setting behind big green hills in the background. David Wojnarowicz is also referenced as a light in the dark for me.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new book of text and imagery, ‘He Would Like To Be Held’. It sits somewhere between poetry and fiction: a portrait of one man riddled with queer shame is constructed through short accounts of his existence in the world and in his head. Each separate account serves as a work, but together, they examine the violence of repressed queerness. We see this in his difficulty moving beyond the boundaries of a troubled adolescence, and the fear associated with of translating a rich, queer internal world into an external reality. Though elusive by nature, accounts of his dreams provide moments of clarity; legitimising his fears, desires and anger whilst simultaneously propelling him towards a world in which translating the internal to the external becomes an inevitability as opposed to a fantasy. The images are photographs, scanned paintings and collages (many from the visual work in the exhibition), printed with handmade pink ink onto paper. Ink was injected into digital printer cartridges using a needle and syringe. The images are an act of removing shame and include photographs of my chest one week after top surgery and my bum after a testosterone injection. Copies of the book are for sale in the gallery.

Artist Statement

Thomas Arnold (b. 2002) is a gay, transgender man and Edinburgh-based multidisciplinary artist. His work is confronting; driven by a need to convey the essence of hidden experiences. He collects emotionally resonant fragments of lived experience - memories, conversations, dreams - and stories from neglected queer histories, especially those of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 90s. Through a metaphorical collaging of these fragments, he explores narratives of queer shame, connection, anger, desire, and the grief and joy that persist across decades, making space for others to feel seen.

His practice centers painting but spans photography, writing and installation, often merging these in the form of sculptural wall works. Motifs of abstract and elusive male figures, isolated body parts, names, dates, emotionally charged mark making and short written observations recur. Colour is all-consuming, much like the experiences his work discusses: deep reds, blues and pinks.

His work asks what it means to move beyond boundaries, and this is reflected in his process, which mirrors queerness by sitting outside of standard mediums and methods. He regularly works with surfaces scavenged from the streets of Edinburgh, including wood, scraps of paper and building supplies, asserting the right of queer stories to exist everywhere.

Thomas graduated from Edinburgh College of Art with a BA (Hons) in Painting in 2025. His graduate project was awarded the Helen A Rose Bequest and selection for Visual Art Scotland’s Graduate Showcase. In 2024, he was awarded a major bursary from The Supporting Act Foundation.