The Collections Community Panel at New Art Gallery Walsall

Their work began with an exhibition and programme titled Here&Queer in 2022, and has developed to take in themes of class, disability, race, and, most recently, joy.

Taking the Collections Community Panel’s beginnings with a queer-focused project as its starting point, this conversation between panel members reflects on their experiences on the panel and how queer perspectives and experiences have shaped their work on it.

Alex Billingham, sophia moffa, and Fynn O’Connor

Collection: The New Art Gallery Walsall

Keywords: community practice, Here&Queer, class, disability

How did you get involved with the Collections Community Panel, and what were your aims or hopes for doing so?

Alex Billingham (AB): I was one of the artists whose work was acquired by the New Art Gallery Walsall as part of their twentytwenty collection. I had met Collections Curator Julie Brown through that and knew them. Julie wanted to highlight various aspects within the collection and explore different ways into it; the first they picked was about queerness and they approached me. And I think my two first questions were ‘Is this okay?’, because I don't have any art history background, and I don't have any academic background. And I was very reassured that it was – it wasn't coming from an academic research positioning, but it was from an emotional connection with the collection and how it affected people now, so that made it really accessible. My other question was ‘Is this just going to be a month-long show in June, when it's Pride month?’ Because so often, organizations are really, really desperate to work with me in June, but just in June. But no, this was going to be a permanent thing.

sophia moffa (sm): One of my works was also acquired by the galley as part of the twentytwenty collection. That's how I met Julie, who was so open to knowing us as artists and people; I shared the work I do and stayed connected. When I founded the Travellers’ Tree CIC which supports asylum seekers through co-creating art together, Julie was really supportive. This was around the same time as Here&Queer and I came to the opening. It was amazing that a gallery was so open and welcoming, and up until then I'd been navigating my own queer journey more quietly. I come from Italy, which isn’t a great place to be right now if you're queer. All of a sudden I was surrounded by people who are open and proud within an institution, and that was pretty new for me to be honest. In the next project, Pride&Privilege, I contributed with the Travellers’ Tree project, and we brought in asylum seeker voices on that.

Fynn O’Connor (FO): I heard about it via two gay friends who were involved at the beginning. At the time I had too much going on in my life and couldn’t find time to join in. I felt sad at the time thinking I’d missed out but later I got in touch when I had more time. I missed out on Here&Queer, but I was able to take part in the Pride&Privilege exhibition and the beginning of Equal+Able=Not a Label. My hopes and aims were to help embed my authentic diversity, through my own LGBTQ+ lens, within the collections, and I looked forward to the chance to meet others in the Collections Community Panel, other like-minded people – as I knew there would be a mix of people from a variety of backgrounds.

Thinking specifically about exploring queerness through the various Collections Community Panel projects, how did you navigate the collection to begin to identify artworks? What did you look for? Was there anything that surprised you about what you found?

AB: I think all credit has to be given to Jon Sleigh here, because they were an absolute bedrock of that first iteration. This was one of Julie’s first actions, that there needs to be someone present who comes from a queer perspective, not to necessarily lead, but certainly to guide the process throughout. Here, Julie is very much stepping back and giving as much space as possible to the community panel and to Jon. Within that context Jon and Julie created a really supportive and welcoming environment where they made it clear that it was about those emotional connections to the work. It was about how you felt with it, and how it spoke to you.

As a group, the one almost rule, which we put in place but knew we would break it later on, is that we didn't want any rainbow flags. Purely because it's such an instant, iconic symbol that it constantly gets slapped over things as a kind of band-aid; it was a case of no, we'll do away with that crutch. But in the end one piece with a rainbow flag did end up coming back into it. But that was fine, because the exhibition wasn't built on top of that. And it was an interesting way of having the rainbow flag within it in that it was a painting of a rainbow hanging over the washing line. When we were all chatting about it, it was that idea that other people’s extraordinaries are our everyday – this is a daily occurrence, and this is just life. Doing the laundry every day is just as queer as being at pride.

sm: For the Pride&Privilege project, I didn't choose an artwork, but the participants on my project chose, I think, about four or five. They chose some works based on how they felt about them, because the project we were creating at the time was about home and what home means. I think it was very much like Alex says, Julie allowed people to just react to a work; I mean, some of my participants didn't even speak English and many had very little relationship with the context of the gallery, which is a very Western way of viewing artworks. And despite that they felt comfortable, and it was very interesting to navigate.

AB: For Here&Queer, the process was a combination of viewing works on the gallery walls, visiting the museum’s stores, and working online – whatever people would find most accessible. And there was a definite push to make sure that the display wasn't just this one hidden room in a corner, and then the rest of the collection was untouched. There was one focus room, but we were also working to permanently embed this topic into the interpretation of the Garman Ryan Collection permanent display. So I picked something on display in the main collection, a couple of tiny little figures because they were quite ancient, but the poses were quite queer. I wanted to convey the idea that we’ve always existed.

FO: I was hoping to find artwork by LGBTQ+ artists so I looked from that perspective to begin with and then I just went with my gut, choosing things I was drawn to visually whether online or in person, in the stores. I also looked at artwork I’d initially seen online, in real-life in the stores – that made a difference as some artwork was larger or smaller than I’d expected and so that had to be taken into account when choosing, as there was only so much wall space in the gallery for the exhibition.

sm: We had a tour of the gallery and the stores. Julie's amazing at getting people down there and just allowing you to go through everything and doesn't mind how long it takes; we'll open absolutely everything, sliding draws and panels out to see each artwork. And then we also used the online catalogue, which I could share with the people who hadn't joined that session.

When you go to a gallery as a visitor, you're very conscious about the fact that you can't touch anything, and that's how you have to view it. But when you go into the stores, it’s completely different – you see work lying around and you see it all like crammed in, which is a very different viewing experience of artwork. And I think that's what’s really special about the Collections Community Panel, and how it allows us to really feel part of everything in that collection – not only through the exhibition, but across the other floors of the gallery, the collection, and in the stores.

Can you tell me about a specific artwork that you engaged with as part of these projects – what was it, and why did it appeal to you?

AB: As an artist, usually my work's quite colourful and quite full on, so it was a bit of a surprise that, for Here&Queer, the piece of work that I picked wasn't what was expected at all. We were in the archive and going through the drawers, and I randomly came across a completely unframed and loose piece of work. It was by Orlando Greenwood and it’s three women bathing, with a male figure in the bushes looking at them. I felt very drawn to the fact that it could be viewed as quite voyeuristic, but I was also interested in the woman at the front, who can be read as protecting the other two women, like a sisterhood of care which certainly you get within queer communities, but also lots of other communities. There are going to be people trying to bother you and trying to make you feel uncomfortable, and you don't always have to be the one protecting. You can be quite small and rely on your friends or people who share similar experiences to occasionally step up. And that rotates. I ended up doing a three-hour performance piece on what turned out to be one of the hottest days of the year, up on the sunroof, which eventually got turned into a film which is online and was in Here&Queer for the final month, I think.

Across the project, all of the pieces were chosen by so many different people for so many different reasons. It showed that queerness and care have so many different forms – it could be a case when others chose an object that you would think ‘Yeah, that's not my cup of tea, but it's somebody else's, and it's brilliant for them that it's in there’.

FO: I chose Out of the Dark by John Keane and Lake, Trees and Church by John Fullwood. They inspired me to create my own expressive artwork and poem response, which led to me doing a talk during the opening of Pride&Privilege where I cried; it was so liberating to be seen and heard. Ever since the gallery opened, I’d always dreamed of having my own artwork displayed in there one day. The artworks appealed to me for two reasons. The Keane work felt like my own LGBTQ+ journey, coming out of the dark into my true authenticity. And I liked the media of pencil in the Fullwood work and the fact it was nature, as nature has always been the constant to help soothe me through my LGBTQ+ journey, my safe space.

Can I ask about your relationship to the term ‘queer’, since it is part of the first display’s title Here&Queer – how do you understand or use this term? Do you find it useful?

AB: In the early stages of the project, we worked with the title of ‘Queering the Collection’. The reason we veered away from that was because it presupposes that we're putting something onto the collection. Whereas the reality was, well, the Garman Ryan Collection was co-formed by a queer person who donated it to Walsall. It is a collection that is for everyone, but it is also a fundamentally queer collection. So we weren't queering the collection. We were just showing some of the queerness that's inherently there.

FO: I found it hard to adjust to at first, as it felt like a slur and reminded me of when it was a negative word back when I was a kid in the 1970s and 1980s. Now after doing my own documentary project where I interviewed over one hundred people from across the LGBTQ+ community, I learnt its positive use now and how people like to use the term queer as a broad word to encompass a broad mix of identities and sexualities. I like how some people are happy that they don’t feel the need to over-categorise themselves and are happier just using the term queer.

AB: My memory is that we had a lot of discussions around the word ‘queer’. There was a definite acknowledgement of the amount of hurt that the word carried with it. In the end we did settle on Here&Queer, because it was simultaneously defiant and joyous, at least to us. But I think even on the wall of the display, there was an acknowledgement that this word does come with pain, and we're not ignoring that pain. But our justification was that queer was, at least for most of us, an all-encompassing term. It meant that wherever you were within the wider, queer community you could hold that identification if you wanted it.

But irrespective of whatever word or terminology or phrasing that we use to self-identify, it will always get used as a term of abuse. Even if there’s a brand-new term that everybody agreed was brilliant and awesome, within three years it would be a slur. I’m the age that went through school with Section 28, and it was interesting to see how this project connected to previous generations and how it connects to younger generations, and how it affects them differently, but it has made a lot of space hopefully for both. I'm sure it was the same with the other exhibitions, but we kept getting lots of tales of school groups or individual groups or young kids coming to it and feeling safe in the space in a way that they hadn't necessarily in other bits of Walsall, and I think there's at least three tales of students coming out to their peers, or children coming out to their parents in that space, because it was a safe space to explain it, which is wonderful. And unexpected.

Here&Queer was followed by Pride&Privilege (2023) and Equal+Able=Not a Label (2024) – to what extent have you found connections or threads following you through these projects? And how has queerness intersected with these later projects specifically, for you?

sm: What I've noticed in the Collections Community Panel is that because the theme changes, but stays very broad, no one gets excluded. We get added into it. I think this allows for a layered view on things – just because you're queer doesn't mean you're just queer, just because you come from a working-class background, it doesn't mean that you just have that. Every project has the last project as its legacy, and it gets integrated into it. Nothing gets removed. There's just more layers, and that might sound messy. But it's not, because it's showing the depth and diversity of each human being and our society.

AB: That was definitely the intention with the initial Here&Queer project. Three of the members, myself included, identified as disabled. So already there was disabilities and queerness, and as a trans woman there's also that going on as well. I think it sounds like we did succeed hopefully, trying to make sure that there's a lot of space for the fact that, like you say, you’re never just one single category! It's like people exist in a whole plethora of different states and they intermingle all the time.

sm: I think what's really nice about the Collections Community Panel is that the people involved are not all artists. They come from quite a mixed group of people who do other things other than art. So it's quite nice that the connections to the works are not only seen through an artistic lens as well.

AB: It's been nice for the groups that people can drop in and out, that you don’t have to be there each time – even if you're only there for two sessions a year apart, that's fine, it’s just as valid.

sm: Sometimes you want to learn; for me, during the Equal+Able project I was really busy, and I don't identify as disabled, so I wasn’t involved directly. But I really wanted to learn more about it and see the different perspectives that I don't know about. And you don't feel like you're intruding or anything, it's such a welcoming space.

Do you have any reflections about thinking ‘queer’ about artworks and museum and gallery collections more generally?

AB: I think just that it's really empowering to see a meaningful long-term interaction rather than a kind of ‘pop up for Pride’ approach. Externally, you can look at these institutions and feel that they're quite formal, and they're quite structural and quite cold. But actually, a lot of the time it is almost helpful not to think of them as a building and as an archive, and more about the individual people who work within these collections and forming much more human relations to them. So then, all of a sudden, these big cold institutions are actually quite warm and quite welcoming and sheltering, and have a great deal to offer everybody.

SM: Most of my art practice involves working within communities and creating in spaces outside traditional museums and galleries where the art generally stays inside its walls. However, when museums begin connecting with communities and creating also within their spaces, they help to bring art outside the institution and different communities in. I think this is so important, as institutions can sometimes feel intimidating, historically unwelcoming to certain groups, or simply unknown as free and accessible spaces. During Here&Queer, another project was running between artists, the gallery, and Creative Health CIC, and for that I ran a workshop at Walsall Pride and Caldmore Community Garden, creating a different kind of queer art with the community itself. I think it helps send a message to say “You are welcome here. You are part of this space”. And I think this also gives people, who perhaps can’t be openly queer, who lack visibility or references, a safe space for them to be their selves. I know this did for me.

FO: I don’t like the term ‘thinking queer’, I just like the idea of thinking from my authentic self - that happens to identify as a genderfluid (non-binary to female) gay artist, author, documentary maker, and performer, that uses they/them pro nouns. It is the inclusivity of all that we should focus on, all intersections, from all people. Whatever our differences are they should be a part of the whole, it is time.

Alex Billingham is an artist who works across theatre, film, live art, digital, and more, exploring ideas of survival and often pulling from their lived experience of being queer,  disabled, trans and neurodiverse to make space for othered bodies. 

sophia moffa is an artist whose practice explores social constructs through the fluidity of the natural world, using sustainable materials to question societal frameworks. They founded the Travellers’ Tree CIC in 2021, which supports and co-creates art with asylum seekers to reshape migration narratives and foster connection.

Fynn O'Connor is a genderfluid (non-binary to female) gay artist (who leads self-healing expressive ArtPlay4u, mixed media workshops), as well as an author, documentary maker, performer, and motivational speaker.