Desire Lines Exhibition at Queer Circle

Created for Desire Lines at QUEERCIRCLE, this series traces and distorts images of queer cruising grounds across Antigua and Barbuda, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Kingdom and Europe. Photographing sites of forbidden connection with one another, with the land, and with suppressed histories and spiritual traditions, the work considers cruising as a spatial practice of survival, resistance and world-making. Developed as part of QUEERCIRCLE’s wider exploration of queer counter-mapping, the series reimagines these landscapes not as spaces of surveillance but as places shaped by secrecy, desire and collective memory.

One work centres on a former plantation in Antigua and Barbuda, connected to the 1736 rebellion planned by Prince Klaas alongside Hercules and Tomboy. The plantation is approached not only as a site of colonial violence, but also as a place where enslaved people risked punishment to sustain culture, knowledge and visions of another future.

Each of the eight works, measuring three metres in height, begins as a photograph before being transformed through riso printing, hand scanning with a portable scanner and heat-transfer printing onto crêpe fabric. Produced in a single shade of green, the slow, layered printing process shifts attention from photographic representation towards material transformation, emphasising the labour of making as an act of remembrance and repair.