Queer Grounds is a young people’s programme supported by Photoworks and Phoenix in Autumn/Winter 2025. Bringing together queer young people, the programme created space for collective learning through making, conversation, and shared enquiry, facilitated by myself and Kairo Kay. You can have look at the exhibition that drew together the enquiry - Where We Meet here
The Programme:
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 above 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’.
