White text of the words queer and metals embraced by wavy brackets and linked by a plus sign over a faded black and white image of a metal working bench scattered with tools.

Hello! Between October 2021 and March 2022, I participated in a digital residency with Craftspace, a craft development organisation in the UK. This page includes the curatorial statement, the social media posts–posted here and @Queer.Art.Words, the video presentation of interviews with participants, and the final essay.

Read the Essay

Queer + Metals is a Craftspace exhibition co-curated by Dauvit Alexander and Deirdre Figueiredo in collaboration with Rebekah Frank.

The exhibition explores the multiplicity of queerness—whether as identity, lived experiences, thinking, cultures, aesthetic, influences, stories, place, and imagination—in relation to metalwork and metalsmithing. It’s a means to affirm, empower and express solidarity between LGBTQ+ creatives, making visible the ways they are shaping, disrupting and contributing to contemporary craft and design practices. Rather than provide answers or fixed ideas, it seeks to open up possibilities and make connections within a diverse, complex and fluid community of making.

Artists featured in the physical exhibition include jeweller John Moore, jeweller and drag artist Fei He, blacksmiths Annie Higgins and Marius Du Pasquier-Greene, knife maker Gilbert Hadden, and metalsmith Theo Somerville-Scott. The exhibition also includes images and video interviews produced as part of San Francisco based jeweller and writer Rebekah Frank’s digital residency with Craftspace.

Dauvit, Deirdre and Rebekah identify as LGBTQ+ as part of their intersectional identities, making this project a personal and collective endeavour. Presenting in public space is an opportunity for a wider audience to become more aware of diverse cultures.