Bio//

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Liam Cole is a painter working in London.

For Instinct #3, he approaches masculinity and transformation via the character Pinocchio. He says, “Pinocchio embodies anxiety and confusion in regard to male puberty and what it means to become a real boy”. Cole imagines Pinocchio as a rickety assemblage, “how he’d look if Geppetto wasn’t a professional woodworker”. Pinocchio’s racial identity is made indeterminate by the varied light and dark woods that constitute his body. His gender is also ambiguous, manifested in the form of a wood axe that both castrates and endows him, creating an opening (or “axe wound”) and an erect phallus (or “chopper”).

Between 2006 and 2015 Liam Cole directed porn videos for Treasure Island Media. In 2016 he began painting. This is the first time his paintings have been exhibited publicly.

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