Living Vivid Exhibition

When I first began my colourful portraiture, many of the people I worked with were drag artists and performers; I started a collaborative crusade to learn from, signal-boost and celebrate as many of the local icons I knew from queer nights out as I could. In 2018 I had an opportunity to put on an exhibition at Dalston Superstore

Forty portraits of kings and queens, club kids and performers, displayed for two months in the same scene that most of them came up in. It felt right: the circle complete.

It was amazing to have so many people see my work, and be such a part of the furniture for a couple months, but in a lot of ways it was a disaster. That poster I made with a friend was never printed, I never sold any of the pieces, and the whole thing cost me about £1500 in a year where I had very little work.

I don’t regret it; it was an exciting thing to do and an apt capstone to an important period of my life, but I’ve not rushed into doing something like that again.

The poster was made out of a bunch of images where a flash had misfired and cast the queen in a accidentally sinister light. I made it into one of my first prints back in 2018.