Queer Grounds is a creative programme for young people, supported by Photoworks, delivered in two phases: from September to December 2025 at Phoenix Art Space, Brighton, and currently - from March to July 2026 at VOLT, Eastbourne.
Through collaborative photography and performance, the programme explores queer identities, histories, and experiences. We experiment with both staged and improvised image-making, using materials, movement, and conversation as creative tools. Together, we are investigating how spaces are inhabited, shared, and transformed, connecting personal stories with the wider histories of queer communities and activism.
You can have a look at the exhibition that drew together the Autumn enquiry - Where We Meet here
Spring Programme 2026:
The workshop series has centered around four prompts that invite participants to explore their relationship to one another and to the camera, approaching photography as a relational tool. Each prompt follows a loose structure: a task that cannot be completed alone - bodies negotiating solutions together in real time - a camera witnessing the exchange as it unfolds, and a simple object mediating the process (chalk, a wood block, string).
Through actions of balancing, holding, meeting, and falling, we are exploring different gestures of sharing and making. The prompts also draw from ongoing conversations present within the book An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail by Hélène Giannecchini about the roles that emerge in moments of togetherness, who becomes the rememberer, the builder, the witness, or the mediator.
Autumn Programme 2025:
Developed through research into the relationships between DIY building practices and queer community organising, Queer Grounds explores how processes of building, from constructing a space to assembling a shelf, can reveal forms of care, interdependence, and collective resourcing. The programme positioned building not only as a technical skill, but as a social and political practice through which communities form, sustain, and imagine themselves.
images below Rootworks by Ruth Mountaingrove and Gay Liberation Front Newspaper
Across three months, the group’s shared enquiry moved between photography, sculpture, and research. Early sessions centred performance as a mode of thinking, staging the prompt to build a shelter together using wooden sticks and a cable release, allowing images to be produced collectively. These photographs were subsequently reworked and re-situated, placed as objects on sculptural models of houses and shelters, and installed as layered wall works that reveal fragments and visual associations beneath them.
A visit to In Our Hands, a queer-led carpentry organisation, became a pivotal moment in the programme. Georjie, one of the co-founders, shared insights into the organisation’s relationship with land and rural space, practices of access and stewardship, and the ethics of working with felled wood and construction waste. This encounter grounded the group’s thinking around the values, energies, and responsibilities involved in building queer spaces.
Running alongside the material enquiry was an ongoing reflection on the formation of Queer Grounds itself, how the group operated, related, and came into being together. This process was documented throughout the workshops and articulated by participant Ash as ‘unravelling who is making images, we all made them, we are, or have become, an artist group’.
