Stiofan O’Ceallaigh

Artist statement

The ‘HOMOPERSPECTIVES’ series came to fruition at the start of the first UK lockdown (March 2020) when I lost access to studio space. They are intended to represent a pseudo-visual diary and convey thoughts, feelings and moments experienced from the beginning of the lockdown to the current day. Created entirely on a mobile phone, the ‘HOMOPERSPECTIVES’ series explores love, sex, mental health, time, place, identity and (in)visibility of the everyday. Up to 30 collages/GIFs are made per day and 1 is uploaded daily to my Instagram. To create these works I have extracted male figures from vintage gay adult magazines and subjects from the works of artists, such as Bob Mizer and Tom of Finland, to name but a few. I find it particularly interesting that when the men are extracted from their original context and placed into a new one - the virtual realities I build from them - they lose a part of their original power and become something else; reflective of my own experience in lockdown. For the Queer Photography exhibition, I have combined selected works from the ‘HOMOPERSPECTIVES’ series to create a showreel with music kindly provided by Australia based musician Vortex Razor.

Artist biography

Stiofan O’Ceallaigh is a multimedia artist and curator born in Ireland. Currently exhibiting between the USA and Europe, Stiofan’s focus is an exploration of the understanding of a queer aesthetic, if indeed, there is one. A personal journey and an acknowledgement of flux, Stiofan’s work seeks to emancipate those who know it, by promoting discourse around areas such as HIV, queer art censorship, body politic and internalised shame/stigma>pride and fundamentally an effort to reduce hate... in all its forms. In 2016 he established a non-profit Queer art project, Balaclava., which strategically functions to connect, promote and create platforms for LGBTQI+ artists globally by devising and producing curatorial projects.