ISOLATED FANTASY (EXHIBITION)
Queer Youth Art Collective’s first exhibition, ’ISOLATED FANTASY’, reflects the practice and thinking of young LGBT artists who have engaged in workshops and discussions between December 2020 - March 2021.
During this time we explored themes of isolation, identity and community. Looking at how several lockdowns and less access to our normal community outlets have affected our making in this time.
Title: Selection Of Drawings
By: Phyllida Jacobs
Phyllida is an artist and writer from Devon who now lives in London. They spend their days working at an education charity and their nights walking, reading, and playing the ukulele.
During the past year of lockdown I’ve turned to nature and my local environment for solace and inspiration, learning about and drawing wildlife. I’ve also been looking inward and exploring the distorted sense of self created by constantly seeing myself reflected in video calls, creating distorted self-portraits. I’ve tried experimenting with media I haven’t used before, like gouache. Making art during this time has allowed me to escape the feeling of being trapped in my home and to connect with other people.
Title: Poetry Selection
By: Ella Alemayehu-Lambert
Poetry, for me, has always been a way of making sense of my identity and my role within the changing social and political landscapes around me.
My work usually explores personal experience, typically along the themes of love, identity, nature, loss, growth and change. My work has featured on the Brighton-based radio station, Platform B as well as being included on Hong Kong Community Radio as part of an event by music producer, Anlin.
I have included a link to the Hong Kong Community Radio piece, as well as videos of readings of my pieces, Etchings, Ghosts and LoveBite.
Etchings explores the silences and absences that mark our distanced lives during the pandemic.
Ghosts is a musing on change and ageing, drawing on both childhood and the natural world.
Finally, my poem LoveBite was written as a short reflection on a recent experience of parting from a lover and watching my relationship to them change as they were removed from the everyday fabric of my life.
Title: backache
By: Liv Wood
Liv Wood is an interdisciplinary artist based in East London. Her practice centres on the body, situated within queer experiences and ecology. Their work explores relationships, materiality, sensation, representation and connection through a variety of different mediums. They are currently completing their undergraduate degree in Fine Art Photography at University of the Arts London.
You can follow her work on Instagram @livflavrd or at https://www.livwood.co.uk.
Often our intentions are different from our experiences. By ignoring those experiences in favour of moving on to the next task, we lose touch with the sensation of our present moment and material existence.
This is a challenge to that old habit- here is an experience of pain shared with and mapped onto the surface of my work.
Exploring my relationship to my body, with Ehler-Danlos syndrome and these forgettable moments of sensation. By sharing the experience with the paper and the lens, mapping out those feelings- both emotional and nervous- a reminder has been made, an expression of sensation not to be forgotten in favour of the next thing.
Title: Swamp
By: Molly Knox
Molly Knox is an 18 year old music student at Durham University from Glasgow. She is a poet, as well as a literary and theatre reviewer. Molly enjoys exploring themes of nature, identity and mental health in her work. (she/her)”
Swamp explores the process of breaking loose from the constraints of heteronormativity and accepting my own queer self. This poem embraces the messy and unglamorous side of coming out, comparing it to emerging from a peat bog and finally being able to bask in freshness of living my authentic self.”
Title: Films
By: Nicole Cyrus
Nicole Cyrus is an artist filmmaker, utilising poetry and documentary functions in her piece's. Gaining stylistic influence's from Soviet montage cinema. juxtaposing story/dialogue with intrusive montage scenes that thematically and intellectually ground the imagery in a rhythmic function.
She hopes this gives the audience equally relevant space to intellectually and emotively engage with the subjects of the film at altering points. Her films realism encompasses the space's between thought:feelings, reality:fantasy.
She feels this is a poignant space in real life as we all traverse our own internal monologues exerting themselves within our heads.
Sleepless vigil: A film about sleeplessness that uses the juxtaposition between nature, and the stagnant and confined spaces of the protagonists room to explores the feelings and thematics of insomnia.
Concept-tions: An experimental poetic film, seen through the eyes of a narrator that explores the relationship and variant meanings behind objects and places.
Title: Fields & Winds
By: Calum Bayne
Calum Bayne is a Scottish artist and curator with an interest in ruins and pining. A studio holder at Mirabel Studios, Manchester, Calum has most recently shown work as part of the solo show Stunts (2020) at Mansions of the Future and Queer Contemporaries (2020), supported by Superbia and Manchester Pride.
He is also part of the Programming Committee (2020-21) at The NewBridge Project, an artist-led space based across Gateshead and Newcastle upon Tyne.
Often drawings float around on dusty, scrap pieces of paper. Winds and Fields are both digitised drawings that are moments of fantasy within ruin, weathered and muddy.
For more information, see www.calumbayne.com.
For more information, see www.calumbayne.com.
Title: Poetry readings
By: Travisty
Hi I’m your local Travisty, Travis for short, and I do spoken word poetry, rap and dabble in singing out of tune. I mostly just consider myself a writer. My writing is about my life experiences and also my emotions towards society and life in general.
I wrote these pieces during the COVID pandemic.
Title: Youth: Seizures Of Earthing
By: Byuka Krow
Byuka Krow is a non-binary witch & artist playing with poetry, ritual and dance. Their practice investigates hybridity and embodied ecologies, menstrual activism and conscious intimacy practices, through a queer lens.
Byuka is the co-creator of the Intimate Animals collective, where they explore animism through interspecies healing practices. Their work is also focused towards community engagement and ancestral connection work through the collaborative project "Your pain is humming in my vertebrae".
Byuka facilitates learning spaces, creating experiments of kin making. They are researching how to tap into the sensual ceremony of life and how to feel the umbilical cord from our body to the earth’s body.
Youth: seizures of earthing is a poetry collection about (trans)formation and the painful, ecstatic mess that is. It is also about memory, about how to talk to the ghosts dancing on tiptoes in the corners of my psyche. ghosts that are, most often, my past selves. There are stories about how friends and lovers become surprising mentors on the initiation journey that is queerness. It's about allowing myself to be a fool. and to find there, the medicine of playfulness. and belonging.
Find them @_nymphology_
Title: MY BEING IS RESISTANCE
By: Leo Judah
My name is Leo Judah. My pronouns are They/Them and He/Him, I use them interchangeably.
I am 18 and am based between Gloucester and Bristol. I’m a big fan of colour in everything, snakes and Queercore and 2000s pop-punk music.
My art is based heavily around my queerness and how that interacts with my life. I am passionate about social justice issues and resistance in the forms we can in everyday life.
This piece was slightly hopeful for the future. I tried to make all the language positive and hopeful.
It includes a self-portrait, painted in acrylic on an A4 canvas, with a background filled with repeated stencilled prints, then overlapped by text, written in multiple colours of permanent marker. I put the piece onto a background of grass and sky because in nature I feel most free, and I wanted this to come across in the piece, the bright colours alongside hopeful text and statements.
Title: r.-generis.ed
By: Angel Dust
Angel (he/they) works primarily with video, dance and text. Their video work explores the tensions between materiality/immateriality in relation to identity and the vitality of dance/movement in liberating oneself from the constraints of living in a capitalist world.
They enjoy using drag and a psychedelic homemade video kind of aesthetic to challenge notions of what art and work should look like. Their creative writing is mostly centred around the themes of intimacy, the subconscious and cruising. You can follow them at @rebelliuschaperone on IG.
While we couldn’t experience the outside world, I started to think of how to make my engagement with technology less predictable, more humane and more poetic. I wanted to break from my routine navigation of the net and to seek more randomness. I started a blog-diary with a friend where we would share our nocturnal dreams with each other.
The human subconscious is fascinating. It made me wonder if I could somehow get in touch with the subconscious of the internet. I thus asked randomwordgenerator.com/ for words that I then turned into poems.
Perhaps these are more of an indication of my own innerworld, but I enjoyed the collaborative nature of being offered the content by the computer for me to play with and try to find meaning in.
Download Collection Here
Title: Selection Of Work
By: Skye Kember
Skye is a non-binary artist who explores the way things are connected, ambivalence and finding balance in a world full of binary thinking. Their work is inspired by nature and personal feelings, with a hope to connect with others on a deeper level as they navigate the world.
our bodies both
fragile and strong
must be held tenderly
nourished patiently
compassionately
with love
This poem does something to explain the connection between these pieces which explore comfort, healing and self-love. I was in a pretty scary car accident in January that I felt lucky to survive. I broke my pelvis, requiring surgery and a couple of weeks in hospital, followed by a long recovery. This time has given me the chance to slow down and appreciate the fragile strength of my body, and also to discover my love of embroidery.
Skye’s Instagram is @spinningoutoftime
Title: “Fitting in”
By: Isabel Chenciner
Isabel is a young lesbian who draws, paints and likes to fill pages with thoughts.
”Fitting in” is a portrait exploring a vulnerable daily moment.
How often we soften ourselves and make ourselves more palatable to pass in day to day life. Sometimes wearing what feels like an entirely different skin to our own.
Title: what have we become (a zine)
By: Joseph Mark
Joseph Mark is a genderqueer actor, writer and zine maker currently in London. Originally from Grimsby, their writing and zines
tends to focus on phenomenological experience and blurring the lines between reality and dreams. They can be found online using the handle @josephmarklong.
Memory. Confusion. Entrapment. what have we become is a zine written over the last year. It includes polaroid photos taken by Joseph Mark.
Read full zine here.
Title: Church of Ascension
By: Lauren Perchard
I graduated from Manchester School of Art in 2020 with a First Class Honours degree in Interactive Arts. My practice centres around graphic design and image making, with experimentation at its core.
Images made during the most recent lockdown, visualising the Queer fantasies of my friend group while we are isolated from our city’s wider Queer community. The Church of Ascension is an Anglican Parish church in Hulme, Manchester — which we claimed as the location for a night of hedonistic Queer reverie.
Title: Cette envie
By: Lauriem Mompelat
Lauriem is a non-binary singer, songwriter, sound-maker from Guadeloupe & Martinique. Their music explores topics ranging from colonial wounds to the unpacking of queer inner whispers, in French, Creole and English. With their sound, Lauriem takes you on a soft and rousing journey into their voluptuous universe: transilience and vulnerability, from intimate blossoms to shared healing.
Lauriem is currently working on their first online productions: a trilogy of EPs entitled 'sound capsule for grieving', 'sound capsule for loving' & 'sound capsule for the revolution'. For updates on their releases, sign up to Lauriem's soundletter or follow them @lauriemmusic.
'Cette envie' is a 2:33 mins sound & videographic voyage with photography from Clara Lorenzo. We explore - in French and English - the sensuality of liberatory desire between queer beings and how it lives in the body.
It is a sensually spiritual journey through the waters of healthy, joy-filled and truth-fuelled unconditional love. An erotic prayer to be tasted with the whole of what we are.
Title: Selection of photographs
By: Alice Carolina
Alice Carolina, 23 years old, in 2015 through the project with com developed an interest in photography, in 2016 she took a course in photography offered by MOMA (Museum of Modern Art in New York) in 2018 she graduated in photography from the university of michigan on the platform of coursera courses. Currently she works as photographer and cinematographer in a community communication project.
This work is about how I and my brothers found different ways to relax and rest reading books or sleeping, listening to music on the net has become a safe place for me and my brother in difficult times like this.
Title: Queer space
By: Marleigh Layne
Marleigh Layne (they/them) is a black queer artist from London. They create illustrations, encouraging others to be their boldest selves and embrace uniqueness. Marleigh is inspired by pop art and queer culture and that translates through their work of black outlines, bold colours and queer content.
They use their illustrations to make tees, handmade accessories and other fun things! Check out the rest of their work over at @marbleheadstudios.
Queer space is an important space! This illustration is a reminder to myself and every other queer that we all deserve a space to be our 100% authentic selves in!
During lockdown I have missed those places and I am thankful to have found my most recent fave online queer space here at queer youth art collective. This drawing represents the warm fuzzy feels I get when around fellow queers.
Title: 2 Poems
By: Sara Mostert
I am a queer pottery nerd who is deeply in love with clay. My ultimate happy place is at the wheel, most likely making mugs.
During lockdown though I have been writing some poetry, (I'm a baby poet)
These two poems have come out of my collection of rocks and other materials (in this case hair) that I have been collecting to make glaze out of.
Title: Isolated Fantasy postcards
By: Romilly Stockwell
My name is Romilly, I am 20 and a first year architecture student at UAL. I work as a barista and editorial intern @thewowmag.
I like long walks on the beach, I think speaking multiple languages is the cool and I like making collages.
A series of postcards inspired by the quote from the ancient philosopher Democritius: 'Sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, colour is colour, but in truth there are only atoms and the void', made with mixed media during this pandemic.
See full collection here.
Title: Drawings
By: Seren Thomas
Seren Thomas (they/them) created Flatboy at the beginning of the pandemic. One day while they were doodling away in yet another Zoom meeting, the style began to just fall out of them. Since then, whenever they feel stressed or anxious they pick up a pen and begin to draw the outline of a Flatboy.
Their art centres trans bodies and seeing these showing joy, community and peace is extremely important to them.
For my queer family. Whenever someone is having a bad day we bombard our Whatsapp group with selfies of us holding our hands over our hearts to show that our love breaches the physical distances between us during the pandemic.
For every trans person who feels invisible, silenced, alone - we see you.
Title: Birthday
By: Sabrina
Sabrina is a poet from South London. Her work explores solitude, homesickness and coming-of-age, particularly relating to mental illness and neurodivergence.
You can follow their Instagram @one_and_only_sabrina.
What comes out of isolation and alienation?
What is the definition of love and family?
What can be made into solace?
Birthday is about the above questions.
Title: In an alternate universe where I am a contestant on The Bachelor
By: Raina Greifer
Raina Greifer (she/they) is a queer creative and theatre-maker who sometimes performs as tween girl Melissa.2009. She is interested in combining poetry and puppetry with drag-inspired performance to explore themes of sex, grief, and femininity. She is an avid watcher of reality tv and is currently writing her dissertation on the ethics of The Bachelor.
In an alternate universe where I am a contestant on The Bachelor is a poem about wanting people to like me. I’ve always felt a need for validation from straight people and men.
The entirety of this show is based on a sense of compulsory hetersexuality and yet I desperately want to be a part of it all!! I want them to think I’m cool and that sucks!!
The video is set up similar to the one on one interviews on The Bachelor. I mostly made this because I love thinking about being in love while also being dramatically sad!
Title: Drawings
By: William Taylor
I’m Will, I’m 20 years old and from London, currently living in Salamanca. During the pandemic I saved up for some equipment to start making digital art, and I love playing around with it all. I like making art as a way of looking a bit harder at my identity, especially as a queer person.
This self portrait is from March of this year. I look a bit tired and I think that’s fair.
My queer family tree was the product of a workshop with Rachael House. I spent an hour in a frenzy, trying to get as much of myself plastered to that tree as I could. Lots is missing, but lots is not.
Title: A Deeply Unstable Sense of Self
By: Mimi Kelly
Having taken up life drawing in the last two weeks of ‘normality’ before the effects of coronavirus became obvious, only managing to attend one class, Mimi developed his practice almost entirely during the course of lockdown. They use primarily a black pen
and sketchbook as a way of exploring their relationship with gender identity and their
own mental health, but has delved into collage also. The use of handwritten messages
is one of the most prominent features of his practice. You can follow their work on
Instagram @art_motherfucker.
This piece is a collage, using both found and specifically printed images in addition to the written words. It allowed me to delve into the fact my self image is often tied to my relationships with others while expanding from my usual format of black and white.
This artwork is a deeply personal reflection on how I exist within my physical body and the growth that comes with addressing that.
Title: Selection of drawings & collages
By: Demelza Monk
Demelza Monk is a stage manager and multi-disciplinary artist based in Cardiff and Cornwall. During the pandemic, Demelza has been turning her creative energies to clay work, sketching and collage. Her practice focuses mainly on bodies and portraiture, and she is inspired by Pagan imagery, queer politics and the landscape of Cornwall, where she grew up.
Currently Demelza is enjoying playing with maximalist imagery, lavish colour schemes and creating whimsical human-animal hybrids.
I am interested in what happens to identity when the human face is replaced with that of an animal; all notions of gender and beauty are erased with it and what is left feels wild and authentic.
’Karensa’ and ’Sorr’ (Cornish for ’love’ and ’anger’) are imagined deities representing the duality of queer identity and culture. ’Karensa’ embodies the freedom of divine love, desire, and joyful expression, whilst ’Sorr’ embodies the weight of intergenerational fury, protest and collective trauma.
’Lowarn’ (’fox’) is a warm-up sketch I created between the two collages and an impression of what queer mortals would look like in this imagined reality.
Title: Creations From a Year of Recline
By: Hannah Martin
Hannah Martin is a queer, feminist artist and illustrator from London, with a BA in Illustration & Visual Media from UAL and an MA in Gender, Media and Culture from Goldsmiths. She’s also an organising member of The Devil’s Dyke Network (https://linktr.ee/devilsdykes) a queer arts collective in Brighton.
Hannah’s work focuses on expressing internal thoughts, feelings and daily observations, turning the affective moments of life into something tangible. She’s interested in the relationship between art and activism, is inspired by community arts and D.I.Y approaches, and dreams of a 90s riot grrrl revival.
Find her work at www.hannahmartin.co.uk or www.instagram.com/hannahmartinartist.
Creations From a Year of Recline is a small collection of drawings and pieces of writing (Hannah’s not sure if they should be called poems or not) made during the pandemic between April 2020 and March 2021.
It’s been a long year of reflection and isolation so through this collection of work Hannah explores the body, memories, feelings and emotions in an open and unfiltered manner revealing her personal truths.
Title: Zine & Drawings
By: Elsie Dent
Elsie is an aspiring illustrator based in Edinburgh. She tries to capture meaningful moments and thoughts of everyday life. She strives for her work to be playful, reflective and sometimes tainted with melancholy. She hopes that her illustrations can bring comfort and open a space for reflection. She also is partial to the odd metaphor or two. You can find more of her work at @craftlouder on Instagram.
This zine was my take on my first walk around the neighbourhood with my brother during the first lockdown. Walking through the eerily empty streets, back in my small, familiar, suburban home town south of Paris.
These drawings came from a silly late night conversation, spurred on by my comment on how ‘I did not want to be ‘lugging lettuces’ around Edinburgh in the snow. The accidental alliteration turned into a series of prompts. The silliness of the vegetable in motion encouraged me to focus more on conveying a humorous, playful energy rather than worrying too much about technical details. These silly vegetables are a reminder to embrace small moments of silliness and joy in the everyday.
’Outside’ – Zine
Silly vegetable alliterations - IllustrationTitle: Going for a Walk
By: Evan Wong
Evan Wong is a non-binary illustrator from Hong Kong working in London.
instagram @evan.eerie
Content warning for suicidal ideation and gender dysphoria.
Having dealt with intrusive suicidal thoughts for the past few years has normalized the sensation to me, and this comic documents the day I tried to go on a walk to distract myself.
READ FULL COMIC HERE
Title: Untitled (Drawing)
By: James Yule
James Yule is an illustrator based in Stratford-upon-Avon. His specialism is character design, often invoking natural imagery to create fantastical characters who may or may not come equipped with a sword. His queer experience informs his art, where vivid, vibrant and evocative characters are the focus. He is a physicist by training and when not producing art he works as an app developer. You can find his Instagram @jyuleart.
I am certainly not the only person who lockdown forced to move back to their rural hometown, and back into the closet. Exploring the countryside near my home gave me a space where I didn’t have to hide who I was.
With this piece I designed a queer, fey personification of the scenery and wildlife I’ve encountered on my walks. His cloak is patterned after a local butterfly species, and the blue and pink colours are of course a nod to trans pride.
Title: Embroidered prints
By: Jazz Prisciandaro-Wood
Currently studying Fine Art and Art History at the Manchester School of Art, Jazz Prisciandaro-Wood is an interdisciplinary artist interested in the therapeutic and storytelling potential of art.
Often adopting labour intensive techniques such as sign-writing and embroidery, their practice focus on personal experiences to explore wider themes of memory, intimacy, and language.
Their work can be found on instagram @jazzprisciandaroart.
These artworks use language and the labour intensive technique of embroidery to explore the artist’s personal experience of the ongoing pandemic.
Lucky? considers how successive lockdowns have had both positive and negative consequences, questioning the idea of luck as completely good or bad.
I Wish You Could Touch Me revisits an older work originally concerned with the loneliness and isolation of moving city and struggling to form new relationships.
Reflecting on the similarities of this experience to life during a pandemic, this new work challenge the appeal for increased intimacy when physical touch has become near impossible.
Title: Watercolour paintings
By: Maymana Arefin
Maymana (she/they) is a queer brown activist and an aspiring community gardener. She is a neuroscientist by training and a spoken word poet at heart. To investigate themes of ecology, climate justice and anti-capitalism, Maymana set up @fungi.futures alongside her MSc research about fungi.
She currently chairs an abolition feminism reading group and is co-founder of @DecoloniseSTEM Collective. Maymana enjoys experimenting with a variety of media, such as: directing for theatre, performance art, writing and painting to explore the issues which she cares about.
in memory of black trans lives - I painted this watercolour portrait (although not based on any one individual) last year in the run-up to the Black Lives Matter protests during the first national lockdown.
It is an attempt to prompt every non-black person - including myself - to stop centring their own emotional responses, to step back, and foreground black trans people who are living in an increasingly toxic world.
The colours are vibrant and joyful in order to recognise that the queer community owes everything to black trans people.
the afternoon Abbu tested positive for COVID-19 - Minutes after I found out that my Abbu (dad), a hospital doctor, had become ill with COVID-19, I painted this portrait of him. His head is surrounded by blue mist, representing both his cognitive ‘fogginess’ from being ill and also my feelings of fear and uncertainty about his recovery. Since it was the very start of the pandemic, little was known about COVID-19.
Due to Tory mismanagement, my dad’s hospital had not only been severely overstretched and underfunded, but also no-one had received any PPE. Painting this helped me to make sense of my anxieties and anger with the government.
imagining someplace else - This piece is significant to me because it is my living record of an exercise in imagination and escape, whilst I was very ill with COVID-19 myself. For around two months, I spent days drifting in and out of sleep and when I did have energy, I used my watercolours in bed to paint out the landscape I’d much rather be in.
Nature became so much more precious, when I wasn’t able to go out and be around it. Now that I have recovered, I use this as a reminder to soak up the sun whenever I can.
Title: The Estranged Guest
By: Philile Nkabinde
Philile Nkabinde is a creative, namely a copywriter and poet by profession. By nature, she is an expressionist and intersectional feminist whose melanin pops proudly and severely.
She is inspired by all that life has to offer and seeks to express the inner world of self and emotion through her writing. Her work usually takes the form of spoken word accompanied by musical sound and variations of visual elements.
When she is not writing nor performing poetry, she will be found in her third natural habitat; practising yoga and meditation in a peaceful place while being embraced by Mother Nature and her sounds.
I wrote and shot this piece in my backyard during the second month of lockdown as a reminder to myself to intrinsically return to self, by calling myself home. It was inspired by a realisation I had after feeling estranged from the "normal me".
I realised that I shouldn’t be waiting for things to go back to normal, instead I should try gently reach within myself to find comforting pockets of normality that already exist within me. I hope this piece reassures anyone who resonates with it to stop waiting and start returning.
Title: Drawings
By: Rob Likes To Draw
Roblikestodraw is an artist, illustrator and Keith Haring fanboy currently based in Bath, UK.
Incorporating elements of fine art and design, his work often includes bright colours, bold patterns and hand-drawn illustration, working in graphic design, printmaking and mural art.
His most recent project has been trying to write a convincing artist bio without sounding like a phoney.
I made these paintings over a series of weeks in lockdown, adding to them whenever I felt overwhelmed and needed something else to focus on.
My experience of making these artworks has been almost meditative, allowing me to focus on producing the work while processing my own thoughts and current events.
I wanted to convey that intensity of emotion — a combination of joy, panic, anger and optimism — in the hope that what I’ve ended up with is as immersive for other people too.
Follow on Instagram @roblikestodraw and email roblikestodraw@gmail.com for work and commissions.
Title: Ghost pieces/comic:
By: Sebastian Faussix
Sebastian Faussix, 22-year-old, Trans/ Queer Bristol-based artist. Pronouns are He/ They.
I work currently work mainly in digital programs, my art centring around Queer people, politics, my transition and comic book and anime characters.
The ghost depicted in these drawings is me as an untreated trans person.
The constant insecurity of my femininity vs masculinity, the daunting feeling of how I'll be perceived, constant, draining, dysphoria.
Untreated dysphoria, left to rot or fade away on the never-ending NHS waiting lists to access basic treatments.
Therapy, to then wait longer to see a doctor, to start HRT, to get Top Surgery, the thing I want most in life.
Link tree
Tumblr
I am ignored but noticed,
Invisible but too visible,
waiting,
my true form,
Happiness,
Gender euphoria.
My life waiting to begin, after a decade of begging to feel human.
Title: Selection of drawings
By: Sheyamali Sudesh
Sheyamali is an artist based in London. They like to use art to deconstruct and admire and daydream. They love birds and words and dancing!
A few weeks ago I took the plunge and got myself a proper (cheap) set of art materials as an investment to a creative practice. The last few weeks have been about figuring out very slowly and sometimes incredibly quickly how and what i want to be making. Its been very testing but also brilliant.
I'm learning (ups and downs) about how to sustain a creative practice through leaning into support (like QYAC) and treating my inner creative child gently. Here's some of what I've been making.
Title: Two poems
By: Tammie Menahhemi
My name is Tammie Menahhemi, I am 24 and my pronouns are she/her.
I write poems about things I see, about nature and things that make me think and feel.
Reclaiming senses is quite simply and celebratorially a queerfully joyful one, best read out loud with much enthusiasm.
Wild Lands is an ode to the wild, to wild-Life, to my teenage self and everyone who is or has been a teenager.
READ WILDLANDS HERE
Title: Zine
By: Tatiana Dal Corso
Tati is a non-binary nature lover, deep connections seeker and tired kid. Coming from Italy, they are currently studying Drama, Applied Theatre and Education at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London.
Their practice has been all over the place during the pandemic, moving from a known performative approach to learning new drawing, painting and writing skills. Tati is interested in the politics of the body and its link to current world issues through an interdisciplinary approach.
Content warning:
The first piece is linked to mental health difficulties.
The second and third pieces show drawings of a shirtless person.
when the world scares me, cutting and sticking paper lifts me. the big city, climate stress and the rest soon leave the space to the sea, the mountains and my transness.
[image description: the pieces are two collages with a person resting in the middle. The first collage is dark, showing images of a city, cars and the stars. It reads: ”time is ending”, ”trapped”, ”my bones are in pain”, ”with no life and with no passion”, ”illusions”, ”disillusion”, ”broken dreams”.
The second collage is pink and light blue, with images of water, sea, mountains and a blue and pink thread. It reads: ”the stars”, ”theatre”, ”breathing in silence”, ”free identity”, ”affection” and ”gay” on the stomach of the person]
Title: Collaborative Playlist
By: QYAC Participants
A feel good playlist made by QYAC attendees on the 25th April. It collects songs that we have been listening to in lockdown.