Talk Art

We meet the inimitable, spectacular, all-star David Hoyle!!!! We explore Hoyle’s prolific output from the stage to the screen to the canvas. Performance as art, art as performance! Cabaret maverick and gender defying revolutionary, the much loved David Hoyle continues to educate, enlighten and entertain in equal measure. A true national treasure.

A chance to immerse yourself in Hoyle’s world, get to know the Manchester artist as we discuss his work that includes paintings, slogan works and of course, riotous, avant-garde live performance.

As a cabaret star, actor and visual artist, Hoyle’s infamous alter-ego ‘The Divine David’ transported him from radical alternative settings in the '80s to the studios of Channel 4 in the '90s. For the last four decades, Hoyle has queered the boundaries between live art, performance, theatre and cabaret – conquering nightlife around the world and working extensively in film and TV.

His recent retrospective Please Feel Free to Ignore My Work at Manchester's Aviva Studios powerfully shared the key themes that run through Hoyle’s output: gender, mental health, AIDS, revolution, decadence and the effects of capitalism. Tracing his career from the '80s to the present day, this body of work asks how and why we value our art and artists. Ever the outsider, David Hoyle opens the door to his outrageous and moving world. Come on in, we’ll pop the kettle on.

We meet poet, artist and filmmaker Julianknxx. We explore themes within his work of inheritance, loss and belonging as he crosses the boundaries between written word, music and visual art.

Sierra Leonian artist Julianknxx uses his personal history as a prism to deconstruct dominant perspectives on African art, history, and culture. Rich with symbolism, his work conveys the Black experience of defining and redefining the self, rejecting labels to form new collective narratives.

Offering song and music as forms of resistance, the exhibition invokes new understandings of what it means to be caught between, and to be of, multiple places. Choirs and musicians from cities across Europe give voice to a single refrain: ‘We are what’s left of us’, transforming the Curve into a collaborative space of communication. As the philosopher Édouard Glissant has written: ‘you can change with the Other while being yourself, you are not one, you are multiple, and you are yourself.’

Julianknxx’s work merges his poetic practice with films and performance; he engages in a form of existential inquiry that at once seeks to find ways of expressing the ineffable realities of human experiences while examining the structures through which we live. In casting his own practice as a ‘living archive’ or an ‘history from below’, Julianknxx draws on West African traditions of oral history to reframe how we construct both local and global perspectives. He does this through a body of work that challenges fixed ideas of identity and unravels linear Western historical and socio-political narratives, attempting to reconcile how it feels to exist primarily in liminal spaces.

We meet bestselling writer Shon Faye to discuss her new book Love In Exile and artists she admires: Nan Goldin, The Bloomsbury Group, Bernini, Michelangelo, Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education and performers including Tom Rasmussen, Madonna and David Hoyle.

Shon Faye grew up quietly obsessed with the feeling that love was not for her. Not just romantic love: the secret fear of her own unworthiness penetrated every aspect and corner of her life. It was a fear that would erupt in destructive, counterfeit versions of the real love she craved: addictions and short-lived romances that were either euphoric and fantastical, or excruciatingly painful and unhinged, often both. Faye’s experience of the world as a trans woman, who grew up visibly queer, exacerbated her fears. But, as she confronted her damaging ideas about love and lovelessness, she came to realize that this sense of exclusion is symptomatic of a much larger problem in our culture.

Love, she argues, is as much a collective question as a personal one. Yet our collective ideals of love have developed in a society which is itself profoundly sick and loveless; in which consumer capitalism sells us ever new, engrossing fantasies of becoming more loved or lovable. In this highly politicized terrain, boundaries are purposefully drawn to keep some in and to keep others out. Those who exist outside them are ignored, denigrated, exiled.

In Love in Exile, Shon Faye shows love is much greater than the narrow ideals we have been taught to crave so desperately that we are willing to bend and break ourselves to fit them. Wise, funny, unsparing, and suffused with a radical clarity, this is a book of and for our times: for seeing and knowing love, in whatever form it takes, is the meaning of life itself.

We meet painter Vanessa Raw to discuss her solo show at the Rubell Museum Miami, where she was the 2024 Artist-in-Residence.

Vanessa Raw: This is How the Light Gets In marks her first exhibition in the United States, as well as her first institutional show. In these newly commissioned, large-scale works, Raw’s distinctive layered brushwork and expressive use of colour depict a dream-like, all-female world—an earthly paradise where the natural world is benevolent and sentient, and where female desire is central. A former triathlete, Raw’s practiced mastery of her own body transfers to her work on canvas. Her figures are tranquil and at ease but have agency. They revel in the company of each other and in the landscape that is lush and soft and ripe with colour—paradise found.

In 2022 Raw took a radical new direction with her work, shifting from traditional portraiture tropes to paint imagined, same-sex, intimate scenes of women in confected landscapes. Surrounded by flowers and trees, sometimes accompanied by fauna too, these suspended moments of blissful intense connections show naked, energised bodies part-merged with each other and the landscapes they are in.

Using a heighten palette Raw conveys the intensity of the moment, as well positioning the paintings in the realm of the imaginary. Likewise, the dream-like fluidity of some areas of mark making suggest an altered state of consciousness, a deep human connectivity occurring simultaneously on a physical and spiritual plane. Photographs taken on her daily runs through local nature areas, an activity undertaken with therapeutical escapist intention, are used as source material for her background landscapes binding their confection to meaningful actualities, pulling into the paintings the remembered feeling of oneness with nature.

Raw works in a semi-naturalistic style, with an intense focus on the textures of the human form. Her large scale paintings are an eclectic variety of tonal compositions, vibrant and stimulating. Some of her more explicit pieces show the human body engaged in sexual acts or reaching the point of orgasm, whilst others in a more subtle manner showcase the innate sexuality of the feminine form.

Born in 1984 in Hexham, England, Raw lives and works in Margate, UK.

Vanessa Raw: This is How the Light Gets In is now open in Miami at Rubell Museum.