Crafting Ideas: Creating Culture
23-27 August 2011
Piccadilly Place,
Manchester
“From Queer to Eternity’ brings together David Hoyle’s De Profundis and Paul Harfleet’s Pansy Project: Working as two disparate artists whose paths have crossed intermittently over the last twenty years in various contexts from Manchester bars and night clubs to theatre venues and the festival circuit. Harfleet and Hoyle are neighbours who pop by for the occasional cup of tea. They are friends who occasionally write, they are perhaps distant brothers who have lost touch. But remotely they have a fondness for each other and the way in which the other works, fundamentally however they both have a shared interest and engagement with the politics of gayness and its peculiar position in contemporary society.
Each were born of a North West art school, both have courted drag / androgynous personas and both have engaged with political activism. These similarities however have created vastly different aesthetics and methodologies, which this show endeavours to explore and elaborate on in this exhibition.”
London based artist Paul Harfleet plants pansies at the site of homophobic abuse; he finds the nearest source of soil to where the incident occurred and generally without civic permission plants one unmarked pansy. The flower is then photographed in it’s location and posted on this website, the image is entitled after the abuse. Titles like “Let’s kill the Bati-Man!” and “Fucking Faggot!” reveal a frequent reality of gay experience, which often goes unreported to authorities and by the media. This simple action operates as a gesture of quiet resistance; some pansies flourish and others wilt in urban hedgerows. The artist began by planting pansies to mark his own experience of homophobia on the streets of Manchester now he plants pansies for others both on an individual basis and as part of various festivals and events.
