Victoria Verseau
Honest Sketches
Drawing
1997-2025
Honest Sketches is a collection of drawings that were never originally meant for public view. They emerged in moments of solitude, as a private language where the unconscious could speak. Because of this, they carry a particular honesty – nothing is staged or embellished. The imagery is naivist, at times even comical, yet often imbued with weight and traces of life-altering experiences.
The motifs revolve around identity, the body, memory, and spirituality: gender-affirming surgery, imagined depths and scar tissue in the newly created vagina and the lifelong act of dilation, sexual abuse, scattered dreams, the search for meaning, lost vitality, and memories of trans friends who are no longer here. Within them lie both vulnerability and rage, along with the shadows of transphobia and the ghosts that remain.
To now bring these private sketches into the light is in itself a risk. “For some reason I feel ashamed of the sketches, but I believe that precisely in what feels embarrassing – what one hesitates to lift out of the secret – there lies a particular strength,” says the artist. By revealing what was once hidden, the sketches become both an act of resistance and an invitation to intimacy and recognition.
This work has accompanied the artist throughout an entire life. The earliest drawing dates back to 1997, when she, as a nine-year-old boy with pencil and ink, attempted to imagine the woman she dreamed of becoming. In this way, Honest Sketches also becomes a time capsule, where every line testifies to both a personal journey and an existential struggle.
Victoria Verseau is a Swedish artist and filmmaker based in Gotland, with an MFA in Fine Art from the Royal Institute of Art.
In her work, she explores themes such as the body, memory, identity, and the tension between a mystified past and a more demystified present. Her works often draw from her personal experiences of being trans and a new woman. Through her own story, she examines larger existential questions: who we are, how we exist, and who we aspire to be.
Her works and films have been presented in group and solo exhibitions at art institutions such as Fondazione Prada in Milan, Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Whitechapel Gallery in London, and Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm.