An informal guided tour of the exhibition with an opportunity to hear from and ask questions of the artists.

Queer at Sea! exhibition - quiet viewing

This is an opportunity to come and see the exhibition during a quiet moment at Memory Library, to find out more about the behind-the-scenes processes and experiences of the participants who took part in the workshops and whose work makes up the exhibition. We will give an informal talk & guided look around the exhibition, with the opportunity to ask questions and get to know us.

Entrance via Victory Gate, please meet us at the entrance to Boathouse 5 at 1pm, if you arrive later just follow the installations through to the back of Boathouse 5 and you will find us with the Queer at Sea! exhibit.

Queer at Sea! - Memory Library (https://memory-library.co.uk/event.html?slug=ev-queer-at-sea)

Queer at Sea! is a collectively made exhibition, celebrating the shared journey and experiences of 8 LGBTQIA+ adults brought together through a series of creative workshops in Portsmouth, exploring their queer connections to the sea and coast. It has been facilitated and curated by Hannah Buckingham, and made possible by a grant from Arts Council England.

Rather than presenting the work of a single artist, the exhibition grows from a shared creative process. Within the workshops, participants explored Portsmouth’s coastline as a site of hidden histories, changing ecologies and personal experience, using found materials, assemblage, storytelling, material experimentation and collective discussion to make work together.

The process itself draws on ideas within queer ecology, questioning fixed boundaries between individual and collective, human and non-human, body and environment. Hannah has approached the group as something closer to an ecology than a conventional artist-led project: a network of different practices, experiences and perspectives that remain distinct while contributing to something shared.

Across the workshops, participants have explored queer histories, neuroqueer and embodied experiences of place, coastal ecology, intimacy, memory and imagination. Objects gathered from the shoreline, fragments left behind by the tide and overlooked histories become starting points for creating new relationships with place.

The resulting exhibition is therefore as much about how it was made as what is displayed. It presents creative facilitation, conversation and shared making as an artistic practice in themselves, reflecting a queer ecological understanding of authorship as something relational, porous and collectively produced.

Description supplied by the event organiser.