An Imaginary Museum: Trans Masc Studies at EAF25

It’s an overcast midweek morning as I catch up with Ellis Jackson Kroese, the artist behind Trans Masc Studies, the beloved Instagram archive turned imaginary museum. They're talking to me after a morning of crafting; specifically, alterations to their wardrobe. “The classic trans masc tradition of buying jeans that are two inches too long”, they laugh.

We speak after Jackson Kroese’s exhibition Memory is a Museum has wrapped at the 2025 edition of Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF). Championing the history of masculine-leaning gender diversity in Scotland, the show consisted of glass vitrines housing archival materials and collected ephemera, as well as a collection of new works made by Jackson Kroese and collaborator Erin Jackson Raynes. The acquisitions on display varied from photographs of ‘male impersonator’ Joe Petersen from the 1930’s, a 1984 memoir by trans Scottish Baronet Ewan Forbes and protest pins from the present day demanding ‘Trans Liberation Now’. The message from the ephemera is clear; trans people have always been here.

Amongst the protest pins and patches are fragments of everyday life, delicate and soft in their mundanity. In a culture saturated with work that – necessarily and crucially – deals with resistance and struggle, it’s refreshing to see this ephemera documenting something as ordinary as the pets and hobbies of trans masc individuals. “Lots of the public bodies that fund queer projects seem to want to focus on this experience of struggle and injustice; it’s a clear and digestible narrative, which must appeal to those who run large institutions,” explains Jackson Kroese. “Memory is a Museum questions the role of these institutions in writing our history, and looks to alternatives that can hold plurality with care, holding space for struggle and rage, while also drawing attention to the joy, light, and connection that is an essential part of trans experience and trans resistance.” This is evident in the work, which holds a great deal of romance and frivolity despite potentially heavy subject matter, showing the spectrum of queer life; the protest and the pleasure.

Trans Masc Studies at Edinburgh Art Festival 2025. Photo: Murray Orr.

Within the vitrines, Jackson Kroese played with form and flatness, placing glass domes over segments of text in newspapers and notebooks. “I wanted to play with visibility and legibility as it relates to passing and clocking,” they explain, using the curvature of the glass to warp, to distort and to expand. Phrases like ‘be heard’ are stretched out and enlarged by the distortion of the glass, given dimension and weight. Reminiscent of the water droplets that sit atop a leaf, magnifying its veins, the domes amplified the message beneath whilst immortalising certain aspects of the text, giving them a physicality, like they are encapsulated in some frozen snowglobe.

Memory is a Museum successfully uses the visual language of the archive to subvert the attitudes and attributes of traditional archiving. This isn’t an institution where the objects are hidden away, to be touched only with white gloved hands. Although EAF has come to a close, Memory is a Museum lives on, perched upon peoples’ shelves and emblazoned across their chests. Jackson Kroese has produced a run of prints and t-shirts as well as a publication which comes in custom-made, archival boxes. You can take pieces home with you, becoming a living, breathing offshoot of the archive.

"We wanted the museum to feel real," Jackson Kroese says, "so we made items that felt like they could be found in a gift shop.” The archival boxes even come with printed glassine gift bags reminiscent of those you'd find on a school trip, filled with sticks of rock and novelty stationery. “When people take the work home they become custodians of the stories and the history held within," Jackson Kroese tells us. "I like to imagine people putting it on their shelves, amongst other books and pamphlets and exhibition catalogues. In years to come, maybe they’ll forget the context, or they’ll donate it to a charity shop for someone to pick up and flick through, and for a few minutes the Museum of Trans Masculinity will be real.”

I laugh at this, commenting that not many artists would relish the idea of their work ending up in a charity shop. “You really have to search for trans history so the idea of someone just happening upon it feels really gorgeous to me,” Jackson Kroese offers. “Donating is just an active sharing”. With traditional archives, collections are often kept safe but not seen, preserved but invisible. Although documented and digitised they can still disappear into the shadows – Memory is a Museum seeks to counter this.

Photo: Murray Orr.

The publication features a list of contradictory mission statements which read like an exemplification of the museum setting as a kind of in-between space; ‘This museum is for you. This museum is for me and only me.’ I ask if it was helpful to think about what the museum is by defining what it is not. “When you explore what something isn’t, it opens up a deep curiosity, and curiosity leads to investigation and consideration of the expansive space left behind,” Jackson Kroese muses. “I wrote this quasi-disclaimer – an attempt to say ‘this museum is not what you think it is’, without giving a direct answer for what it is. Let the audience decide!”

This outlook is present throughout the project with Jackson Kroese hesitant to take on a voice of authority, positioning themself firmly in the camp of student, not scholar. “I’m discovering this stuff alongside everyone else," they say. "I call this project Trans Masc Studies because I’m a student of this history too; I’m exploring, learning, sharing. Every day’s a school day.”

This is the power of a speculative museum; to collect and curate without the demands of an institution. There’s a fluidity and lightness to the project because of this, evident that it’s a result of whims and passions and not clunky funding bodies. Despite the intangibility of the project Jackson Kroese has received a number of requests from people to intern at the archive. “It’s just my hard drive,” they laugh, "it's interesting how people develop ideas of authority.” Is this something they would consider, I ask, a bricks and mortar museum? “Maybe an independent transgender university would be more fitting! Like the Bauhaus but with more packers and testogel.”

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Trans Masc Studies, Memory is a Museum was part of Edinburgh Art Festival, 7-24 Aug 2025
transmascstudies.com