Queering Connections - Narielwalla // Dixon  Event

Both Narielwalla and Dixon work with collage as a main artistic medium, layering high art and popular culture references within their aesthetically different art works. In their work relating to identity and LGBTQ+ themes both artists draw on their personal stories and journeys as well as broader concerns relating to queer lives and histories. Dixon’s and Narielwalla’s works investigate place and space, considering where they have each lived and worked. They have also created works inspired by queer icons and musicians, such as David Bowie, Klaus Nomi, Madonna and Kate Bush. The exhibition draws connections between their artistic practices and the themes included in their work and invites visitors to make further queer connections.

Jeremy Dixon publishes queer Artist’s Books under the imprint Hazard Press (founded in 2010). He is a poet and his first collection ‘A VOICE COMING FROM THEN’ (Arachne Press, 2021) won Wales Book of the year Poetry Award 2022. He was born in Essex and moved to South Wales as a teenager. His artistic and poetic work is influenced by living as a gay man and working within various jobs, including teaching yoga, dog walking, retail work, freelance design and as a poet.

Hormazd Narielwalla was born into a Parsee Zoroastrian family in Mumbai, India and moved to the United Kingdom in the early 2000s to study fashion design. During his time working as an intern at a Savile Row tailors, Narielwalla became interested in the ways in which patterns could be reinterpreted to carry the story of the maker and the wearer into a new creation that reimagined the original intentions but were layered onto a new artistic interpretation. He is fascinated by the relationship between the human body and how clothing can transform identity and character. His abstract and figurative work investigates gender, sexuality, migration and diaspora.

The exhibition runs across LGBT+ History Month and is curated by Dr Shaun Cole, Associate Professor in Fashion, and co-director of the Intersectionalities: Politics – Identities - Cultures (iPIC) Research Group at Winchester School of Art.