For this issue we ask Artists whose practice is based around Queer Art to respond to the topic - 'What is queer art?' The implication being that it is different from just 'art'. It is this concept of otherness that is integral to understanding its meaning. According to the Tate glossary, queer art is: "Art of homosexual or lesbian imagery that is based around the issues that evolved out of the gender and identity politics of the 1980s". However, simply defining queer art as art made by people who are homosexual or lesbian, is as reductive as defining queer people as those who have same-sex relationships. Whilst love, sex, and desire are often themes within queer art, it is problematic to focus merely on this, Queer art, also known as Queer Aesthetics, broadly refers to modern and contemporary visual art practices that draw on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender+ imagery and issues, while by definition there can be no singular 'queer art'.
Artist name: Tess Baxter aka Tizzy Canucci
Travelled all night: The avatar is me in Second Life, a space where I shared a very close two-year online relationship, between a woman in the US, and myself, a transwoman in Britain - I never knew her 'real' name and didn't feel the need to. This is a digital image made around that time, turned to print later using photopolymer etching. In 'Sun Dirt Water', the Waifs sing, 'would you travel right across the world to meet a woman you didn't know', and the title is my answer to that, and of the many hours staying up into the early hours of the morning with her, a continent apart.
Bio: Tess Baxter is a video artist and printmaker who blends different technologies and worlds. Her video art is made out of (rather than ‘in’) a digital online world, as she edits it together with Creative Commons and public domain material from other places and times, to make the past and present talk to each other. In turn she has taken her video art into traditional printmaking, to explore the relationship between digital production (and light) and mechanical production (and ink). Academically she is multidisciplinary, connecting her history with subjects, from a BA sociology (UCLan) to an MA gender, sexuality and culture (Manchester University), and then to her recent practice-based PhD in contemporary art (Lancaster University).
Instagram: @tess_baxter_
Website: https://www.tessbaxter.com & https://tizzycanucci.com/
Artist name: The Naked Artist
Title: Gay
Bio: Suzie Pindar is a unique and charismatic artist, born in Sheffield in the late 1970's. self portrait. Her art career began in her youth when she attended her local art college. It was several years later that she was discovered by a local gallery in Sheffield. It was their enthusiasm and professional opinion of her as an artist that encouraged her to exhibit and extend her talents. Suzie later moved South and has had exhibitions of her work around the UK, from Yorkshire to London.
She currently resides in London. Upon asking her for a description of her work, she focuses upon the self-expressive aspect of this. Suzie's art is an extension of herself…. Her works combine typography with other media producing emotive and original pieces of art.
Instagram account: @suziecpindar
Website: www.thenakedartist.co.uk
Artist name: Enzo Marra
Bio: Enzo Marra is a London based painter who studied for his BA degree at the University of Reading and his MA degree at the University of Brighton. He has been selected for the John Moores Painting Prize in 2012 and 2016, the Threadneedle Prize in 2010, 2012, 2013 and 2016, and the Creekside Open in 2013, 2015 and 2017, where he was chosen as a prize winner by Jordan Baseman in 2017. He has also been selected for the Beep Painting Biennial in 2014 and 2016, his paintings being highly commended in the 2014 exhibition. He has conducted artist residencies in Swansea and in Sicily, and has been a judge for the Beep Painting Biennale in 2020, aswell as being a longlist judge for the Solo Award in 2018.
His imagery is marked by a distinct immediacy and a figuratively derived world that lives through his painted and drawn works. His previous artworld connected artworks, having moved through photographic inspired imagery and other found source materials. Their forms having been reduced and concentrated into folk art cartoonesque scenarios and notions, which challenge the normal constraints of the reality we live within. His more recent subject matter which relates to a usually darker existential existence, is now made visible via instinctively applied linear and blocked out passages. The figures and symbols utilised relating to the human condition, their emotional impact emphasised by the directness of their application, without extraneous information to muddle the message they are willing to deliver. Their intimate scale allowing the viewer to build a relationship with their cast, as they are stood in-front of the hung painted surfaces. The purposely limited palette, allowing the depicted scenes to not be obscured or overtaken by unnecessary frivolous flourishes. His figuration having taken on a necessary degree of abstraction, to give it that impact and aliveness that he hopes can be achieved through freed pigment and drawn mediums.
Voyeur (white socks): An evocation of the voyeur’s gaze and the target of its attentions. The white socks exaggerating the bareness of the legs.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/enzomarraart/
Website: http://www.axisweb.org/p/enzomarra
Artist name: Tamir David
Bio: Tamir was born in Israel. He left his home at a young age in search of new cultural horizons. After years of studying native art forms in Asia and NZ he established his studio in Australia.
Tamir created and exhibited in Sydney for 15 years and was part of the Sydney thriving art scene. These days Tamir is back in Tel Aviv , exhibiting his work in Europe and the UK . Tamir’s complex identity is embedded into his work which is inspired by subconscious information clashing with reality. Tamir paints, draws and etches using techniques he meticulously developed.
Without formal training he has established himself internationally as a unique painterly voice.
Title: All by myself
Description: A high ranking general is having a bit of fun. Graphite on paper
Instagram account: @tamirdav
Website: https://tamirdavid.com/
Title: We do not need your opinion to thrive or exist!
Names: Kate Aries & Manon Daisy Franklin-Fraiture
About: Manon Franklin-Fraiture creates playful illustrations that incorporate conversations and questions she overhears and brings them to life, shining a light on how human existence can be in our modern life. Kate uses the body as a way of questioning her identity in the contemporary world, physically, sexually, virtually and digitally: often creating a tension between a position of sexuality and one of vulnerability. Here Kate uses projection to perform and animate Manon's illustration "We do not need your opinion to thrive or exist!".
Instagram: @katearies_artist @manondaisyillustrates
Web sites: katearies.wixsite.com/kate-aries-fine-art/
www.etsy.com/uk/shop/ManonIllustrates
Artist name: Efrat Merin
Bio: Born in 1989 in Tel Aviv, Efrat Merin is a multidisciplinary artist engaged in drawing, painting and filmmaking. She is currently participating in Turps Studio Programme in London. In 2021, she will be an artist in residence at Kunstnarhuset Messen, Norway. In 2020 she had a solo exhibition at Maya Gallery, Tel Aviv. Merin’s video work ‘Street’ participated in Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann’s project Labour in a Single Shot, and has been exhibited in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, House of the World Cultures, Berlin, and Venice Biennale, among other central venues. Her feature film ‘Tel Aviv: Story of a City’ was awarded Best Documentary Feature of Cutting Edge International Film Festival.
Title / context: Medusa, My works set forth a queer retelling of mythological narratives. Gorgons, witches, hybrids, and hermaphrodites fuse into an image of queer subconsciousness. Nakedness is disengaged from sexuality, binaries of femininity and masculinity are transgressed. Female desire, with its long history of being demonized, is unabashedly celebrated; the female gaze regains its power.
Media: Painting, cold encaustic
Instagram account: @efratmerin
Website: www.efratmerin.com
Artist name: Hanneke Wetzer
Bio: My oeuvre is an appeal to challenge the constraints of conventional thinking.
All aesthetics are underpinned by an undercurrent of our innermost cravings and fears.
My focus is on themes such as identity, privacy, gender- and neurodiversity.
The world I create always looks different; from clinical, surreal alienations to cuteness with a naughty dose of humour.
Instagram account: @me_and_my_dollfriend
Website: http://www.hannekewetzer.com
Description: “LOVE = LOVE”. Lesbian love, gay love, bisexual love, transgender love, pansexual love, queer love, asexual love, …. LOVE = LOVE is a call to accept all kinds of love and to stop LGTBQA+ violence and discrimination. Media: photography
Artist name: J R Oatts
Bio: I create colourful, vibrant and dramatic abstract art that explores unexpected connections between human emotion and patterns and shapes found in nature. I’m interested in how we connect to each other and the universe around us. My aim is to encourage curiosity about what we perceive, what we know and how it makes us feel. I identify as bisexual and have been involved in LGBTQ+ organisations for the past 25 years. Most recently, I created and hosted The Outvertising Podcast where I interviewed LGBTQ+ creatives and inspiring people working in the media and advertising industry. My struggles as a queer artist are the same as many bisexual people. We lack representation due to bi-erasure and biphobia - from both the straight and queer communities. Although most of my art does not specifically call out LGBTQ+ issues, I feel like it comes from a queer perspective - focusing on movement, the body, colour, flamboyance, performance, space and nature. My sexuality plays its part in how I view the world, and therefore how represent that world in my painting.
Instagram account: @jroattsart
Website: https://www.jroattsart.com/
Title: Somewhere Under the Rainbow (60x90cm acrylic on canvas), Acylic
Description: Dorothy showed us what lies 'Over' the rainbow, but what about under it? 'Somewhere Under the Rainbow' explores the rainbow as an ever-evolving symbol of hope - in an increasingly confusing and rapidly changing world.
Artist name: George Storm Fletcher
Bio: George Storm Fletcher is a Queer Artist, purveyor of propaganda, and menace.
Bring Back Fingering, and Kissing is Fucking are confrontational assertions rejecting the hyper-sexualised, commercialised narrative, that wider society puts onto lesbian and queer people. The statements are deliberately vague with regards to roles, genders and sexualities. There is no correct way to love, exist or have sex (or not.) Enforcing rules and prescriptive norms is exclusionary, as well as frankly, boring. Both pieces act as reclamations of words and realities that have been henceforth used and defined by men. Bring Back Fingering is a call to arms to the audience to rethink and challenge the pervading narratives surrounding sex. Fletcher feels protective over Kissing is Fucking as it was born out of real love for the queer community and non-normative acts of intimacy, both platonic and romantic. In equalising both gestures, kissing and fucking, the assumption that one act is more worthy or valid is dispelled. Fletcher encourages us to value the nuances and individuality of each original moment, forgetting about what society tells us is important.
Instagram account: @georgeartgreg
Description: Kissing is Fucking/Fucking is Kissing, September 2020, 2xA5. Linocut on Paper/Digital Photography.
Artist name: Beth Swan
Bio: Painting women and non-binary people through a bisexual lens, I record an alternative domestic space free from a penetrative heteronormative gaze. Painting solitude bodies between the sheets in their private moments allows for expressions of alienation and in-between-ness regarding my identity and sexuality. A contemporary insight into my every day as a bisexual young woman and the subversive relationship I have with my body is captured.
Instagram account: @bethswan__
Title: Venus, Oil on board 42 x 59 cm
Artist name: Claudia Sneddon & Joe Morris
Bio: We are an interdisciplinary duo. Our practice is rooted in an on-going dialogue with each other about our own experiences as queer people, queer semiotics and our desire for art to be an uplifting affair for both ourselves and our audience. Campness and whimsy can be regarded as trivial and superficial but we fully embrace it, rejecting the heterobanality of the traditional framework of the white cube space. Humour and kitsch style are important to us as we poke fun at ourselves when broaching serious topics, in order to make the work enjoyable and accessible. Our dynamic is often one of chaos and high energy, which fuels a momentum for impulsive creation. Challenging the boundaries of our identities, we explore queer comfort zones within the heterosexual matrix through performance, video, and language. These shared sensibilities will drive our expedition in reclaiming agency of our own queer enjoyment and gender expression. Utilising a childlike sensibility of mischief, we value a blend of work and play, running parallel to our exploration of tactile queer platonic intimacy.
Instagram account: @oliveandanya
Description: Performance Video Stills “The Dip”. This image is a still from a film that sees our amorphous drag personas in their own queer domestic setting, a crack in the walls of heteroland. We wanted to create an atmosphere that merges camp humour and a surreal, grotesque discomfort with a grim but glam style, exploring the intersection and historical relationship in media between queer identity and horror.
Artist name: Francesca Alaimo
Bio: I am a self-taught mixed media artist based in London. I create interventions on paper through manipulation and transformation of materials and images, using prints, water based oils, acrylics and wax. I explore visibility, vulnerability and courage within the context of gender, sex, sexuality and identity politics. Part of my artistic practice is to undo what I have painted, mirroring the act of deconstructing our certainties and exposing our inconsistencies. My work looks at the challenging nature of truth and what really goes on under the surface which can be ambiguous and yet definite, contradictory and yet consistent. It revolves around the idea that the body is a situation, not just something we get assigned to at birth. My subjects have accepted that they don't need to fit in, instead, they challenge others to see, feel and want the essence of what is rather than what appears to be.
Instagram account: @francescaalaimoartist
Website: www.francescaalaimoartist.com
Description: “We Are Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On”. Theatre, magic and transformation are at the centre of this piece, which revolves around the idea of gender being fluid and performative. We perform different roles, depending on the audience, in order to create an illusion which may or may not represent who we truly are.. Mixed media on paper print (oil, acrylics, wax). The white frame is part of the work.
Artist name: Tyler Wilson
Bio: My practice focuses on the actions, interactions and behaviours of people and society. Looking at S P A C E S whether they be digital or physical. They modify the way we exist in them. I attempt to co-operate with the already existing infrastructure navigating my position, (physically and figuratively), to question the functionality of a particular space in relation to myself. Being a homosexual man, as a stimulant, has its advantages and disadvantages in the way I act in spaces and converse with people. Treating myself as an object I better understand the space around me and how I co-exist with it.
I create work that aims to question viewers perceptions of what happens within the superficial reality of different spaces along with our individual complexities which cause disruptions to overall functionality. Which is (re)imagined in a (hyper)reality.(Former gay, not homosexual, not queer, evolving into … unknown?)
Instagram account: @theunenrolledwilson
Website: https://theunenrolledwilso.wixsite.com/my-site-1
Description: “HOMO-EARTH”. This is a still from a short video animation I made which is similar to some of my previous ones. The concept behind it was using screenshots from google maps combined with me spinning to produce fast animations as a way of me occupying the world as a homosexual man. To push what we think of queer spaces which to me our existence is enough in our daily lives moving through spaces to call these 'Queer Spaces'. The word 'Queer' for me is a double ended sword. A part of me resists the word because I don't gravitate towards it but part of me does feel it is encompassing of all. I wouldn't label myself as a queer artists due to the very fact my work provokes what it is to be queer which I think many others wouldn't agree with me on.
Artist name: Rayden Lawrence
Bio: Rayden Lawrence is an LGBT+, 21 year old emerging artist. Rayden is from Canso, Nova Scotia and he graduated with a BFA in Visual Arts from Memorial University in May 2021. Rayden periodically addresses LGBT+ identity and racism in his work, inspired by challenges he has faced in his interracial same-sex relationship. Rayden’s artwork has been exhibited in galleries within Canada, in New York, USA, and in London, UK. Rayden has been recognized as a promising student, as he has received five scholarships and The University Medal for Academic Excellence in Visual Arts from Memorial University.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rayden_lawrence/
Website: https://raydenlawrence99.wixsite.com/website
Description: “Portrait of a Dear Friend”, "Portrait of a Dear Friend" is a digital portrait of a friend of mine who is transgender. This work was challenging because illustrating trans bodies was new to me, and I wanted to portray my friend accurately and elegantly. This work aims to celebrate and honour diverse body types, and give more representation to the LGBT+ community.
Artist name: Kohlben Vodden
Bio: Kohlben Vodden is a British/Australian self-taught artist living and working in London, England. He defines his practice as psychological art, that sits at the intersection of conceptual and fine art. Focusing on abstract figurative works in oil, he creates intimate social experiments with the beholder. His bold geometric style commands the minds attention and is carefully designed to evoke specific emotional and physiological responses, creating a lasting psychological connection between artist and viewer. While a newcomer to the professional art world, Vodden is a lifetime creative who spent many years perfecting his artistic practice in figurative realism drawings while working in the advertising profession. Vodden began his professional artistic journey during the UK COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 when he developed “Orange Ebby” the first piece in the abstract portrait series entitled “Engineered Pleasure” that is inspired by Neuroaesthetics – an experimental field of psychology that seeks to understand how the brain perceives, and is rewarded by, beauty. This was also his first oil painting. His work was quickly recognised and domestically and internationally and has been included in exhibitions in Abu Dhabi, Milan, and London. His unique approach was also recently included the UK art collectors publication Artist Talk Magazine.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/voddenoriginal/
Website: https://www.voddenoriginal.com/
Description: “Mint Max” Mint Max is part of my abstract portrait series ‘Engineered Pleasure’ which explores the experimental field of psychology known as Neuroaesthetics. The muse for this piece is the truly inspiring Max Hovey who is an LGBTQ influencer, model, and mental health activist