BIG LOVE curated by George Storm Fletcher at Hyde Park Art Club, February-April 2026

by Holly Grange

‘Let us move on. Let's take a few breaths of fresher air. Let's start with the belief, hope, wish, that mutual love is possible.’ (RD Laing, 1989)

BIG LOVE arrived at just the right moment, welcoming the Leeds arts scene into its tender embrace. On Valentine’s Day, it opened its joyful and unapologetically exhibitionistic arms at Hyde Park Art Club (HPAC). Curated by artist George Storm Fletcher as a ‘love-letter to artists’, and to artists’ countless and manifold loves, it also served as a fascinating exploration of love in all its messy, slippery forms. Intentional or not, the exhibition became something of a Valentine to the artistic community of Leeds, Fletcher's chosen home city, with two-thirds of the selected artists living and working there.

If BIG LOVE has a manifesto, it can be found in Fletcher's open call, which requested ‘heart on sleeve, honest (embarrassing even) works’, ‘naïve artworks’ and ‘impulsive gestures’. Revealingly, insisting during their public talk with Benedetta D’Ettorre, co-director of HPAC, that this is ‘not a show about who has exhibited where, or a show requiring long sentences of justification about how an artwork is relevant to the brief or interesting.’ It feels like a refreshing tonic in an art world often fuelled by prestige, professionalisation and carefully honed statements. The rebelliousness of Fletcher’s curatorial approach will come as no surprise to those familiar with their artistic practice. A self-described ‘artist menace’, they have built a body of work that is queer, playful, emotionally open and resistant to contemporary art's more cynical tendencies.

Fletcher's call-out reads less like a curatorial framework than a challenge: what would happen if we took devotion, obsession, admiration and tenderness seriously? What kinds of artworks emerge when artists are invited to be earnest rather than ironic?

The generosity of this premise is made manifest in a broad-ranging and unruly group of selected works by 30 artists. Rather than following a conventional hang, the exhibition spreads across the walls and surfaces of the Art Club and bar like a mycelial web, connecting disparate works through proximity and association. To my relief, BIG LOVE does not attempt to present love as a singular romantic ideal. Love appears here as friendship, fandom, obsession, faith, care, longing, grief, admiration and collective belonging. Love runs throughout the exhibition as connective tissue: in acts of identification and sustained contemplation, in gestures of bodily intimacy and desire. It emerges not only as a subject, but as a method: a way of making art, looking at art and relating to others.

But how to write about such a show? There is certainly a love in critique, I believe, and in the attentiveness this requires. Love is not opposed to theory, thought or critique, as certain modes of thinking might suggest, casting the critic/writer as a dry or detached individual. Rather, love enables a particular kind of knowledge. We come to know the things we love, and we come to know them differently from the things we do not love.

So rather than attempting a comprehensive, and impossible, survey, I want to take this as an opportunity to give sustained attention to a handful of works that have stayed with me since visiting the exhibition. I would also urge readers to seek out the accompanying book, featuring all 30 exhibiting artists alongside a further 50 contributors.

We start with Jill McKnight's Life Can Only Be Understood Backwards But Must Be Lived Forward, a title borrowed from a line in the 1843 diaries of Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard. In essence, we can only fully grasp the significance of events, relationships, decisions and their consequences in retrospect, even though we have no choice but to blunder our way forward through life without the benefit of that hindsight or the ability to edit the script retroactively. Perhaps art-making provides a way of negotiating these injustices? McKnight’s diminutive oil pastel sketch occupies a special place within the exhibition's origin story. Fletcher spoke about first encountering this double portrait of partners in life and art, Jill McKnight and Joshua Hart, surrounded by their menagerie of animal companions, tucked discreetly in a solo exhibition. Like a votive offering, the work became the catalyst for BIG LOVE itself.

Looking at it, I found myself wondering about the particular nature of artistic partnerships. What does it mean to share a life with someone who understands the compulsions, frustrations and peculiar rhythms of being an artist? The history of art is full of artist couples, from Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely to Marina Abramović and Ulay, whose relationships blurred the boundaries between collaboration and individuality. McKnight's work does not offer grand statements about this condition; rather, it suggests two creative lives unfolding alongside one another, occasionally intersecting, while each retains its own trajectory. Love is found here not in spectacle or transcendence, but in companionship, reciprocal support and the accumulation of ordinary intimacies.

Moving from McKnight's vision of companionship to the darker terrain of Eros, Ellen Burroughs' Odes series explores the uneasy territory where desire tips into obsession. Screen-printed in black ink on pink butcher's paper and steeped in a scent reminiscent of Calvin Klein's iconic Obsession perfume, the works take as their starting point a fragrance synonymous with erotic fixation. Burroughs recreated the perfume working from descriptions of its musky, amber-heavy composition rather than using the perfume itself, less interested in the scent than in how it survives in memory: distorted, embellished and transmuted over time. What remains is the fragrance’s afterimage, reconstructed through longing, cultural mythology and personal association. I have long been fascinated by the strange literary world of online fragrance forums such as Fragrantica, where perfume reviews read less like consumer guidance and more like miniature works of fiction. These repositories of longing, fantasy and projection feel ripe to me for artistic appropriation, and so I was excited to see Burroughs explorations into the olfactory.

The printed images in Odes possess the unsettling logic of dreams or tarot cards. A nude couple hang suspended on a love swing, inverted and conjoined like mating invertebrates. A hand drapes languorously across a reclining face. Ants swarm across bare skin. Elsewhere, what first appears to be a cascade of luxuriant hair is revealed to belong not to a human body, but to a horse, its face obscured beneath a waterfall-like mane. My one reservation is that the works demand a scale commensurate with their emotional intensity. I found myself imagining them enlarged and unfurled across the gallery in great draped swathes of scented paper, hanging from the ceiling like scrolls or banners, their heady aroma saturating the space and enveloping visitors in the atmosphere of seduction and unease that the images so effectively conjure.

Emerging from this feverish dream-state, I encounter pages pinned to the wall like confessional diary entries featuring a storyboard of painted horses. These are Islay Wolstenholme's works Horse Comics, where the central protagonist is a white horse called Buell, an avatar for the artist herself. The comic traces the aftermath of loss, anchored by the line, ‘What is grief if not love persevering?’ I found myself contemplating why this work struck me in the way it did. Perhaps these curious and sincere horse comics lodged with me because I encountered the exhibition in the aftermath of my own personal loss. As bell hooks reminds us, ‘love knows no shame. To be loving is to be open to grief.’[1] BIG LOVE understands this intuitively. Its most compelling works recognise that love and loss are not opposites but companions, each revealing the contours of the other. Following the death of my sibling last year, these ideas have felt less like theory than lived reality. Grief has sharpened my awareness that love persists beyond presence.

There is an earnestness to Wolstenholme’s work and several others in the exhibition, and I mean that in no way as a criticism, but it is nevertheless a quality that is increasingly rare in contemporary culture. Horse Comic possesses something of the homemade stories, drawings, and cartoons we often make just before we transition into our teenage years: emotionally direct, slightly awkward, unconcerned with coolness. There is no attempt to disguise vulnerability beneath layers of sophistication. Instead, Wolstenholme allows grief to appear in all its raw and sometimes melodramatic dimensions, trusting that sincerity can carry the work. We live in a culture that largely continues to denigrate ‘girlish’ forms of attachment and expression, like fandom, romantic longing, emotional excess, diary-keeping, horse obsessions, crushes and heartbreak, often dismissed as frivolous or immature precisely because they are associated with young women and girls. Yet these are often the very experiences through which we first learn about desire, devotion, identity and loss.

Questions of value, belonging and social acceptance around expressions of love and desire resurface elsewhere in the exhibition. Connor Shields' contribution, a vinyl text piece, Bar Dykes and Promiscuous Gay Men, applied directly onto plywood, reproduces a passage from Gayle Rubin's landmark 1984 essay ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’. In it, Rubin describes the hierarchies of sexual value that structure society, observing that ‘stable, long-term lesbian and gay male couples are verging on respectability, but bar dykes and promiscuous gay men are hovering just above the groups at the very bottom of the pyramid.’ Four decades later, the quote retains its sting, drawing attention to the ways desire continues to be organised through systems of legitimacy and exclusion.

Several works in BIG LOVE also point towards bonds of friendship and solidarity. Among the most affecting is Hannah Guy's photographic lightbox work Lady Beetle, which depicts two of the artist's friends in an ordinary domestic setting: one perched on a toilet seat, the other reclining in a bathtub. There is nothing spectacular about the scene, and therein lies precisely its power. The photograph attends to the quiet intimacies that exist between close friends: the ease of shared space, the comfort of being witnessed, the ability to be entirely oneself in another's presence. Guy has described the work as being about ‘the grounding presence of a friend that explains, stays, observes and laughs.’ Friendship is often overshadowed by the cultural prominence afforded to romantic and familial relationships. Yet Lady Beetle suggests that some of our most meaningful forms of love emerge through our chosen relationships with friends.

Friendship has been much on my mind recently as I research the forms of collectivising, mutual support and affective solidarity that emerged between artists in the North of England during the Thatcher years for my ongoing PhD on art from the North in the 1980s [2]. The parallels between then and now can feel striking. The artists I am researching were responding to deindustrialisation, mass unemployment, racism, homophobia and the systematic dismantling of public life. Today, many of those same fault lines remain. Yet we also face new battlefronts: deepening economic inequality, the resurgence of the far right, intensifying transphobia and Islamophobia, the climate crisis, and genocidal violence in Palestine unfolding in real time across our screens.

Recently, I have been reading Elif Sarican and Dilar Dirik on the revolutionary experiment in Rojava. Drawing on the Kurdish concept of hevaltî, they describe friendship not simply as a personal bond but as a form of comradeship rooted in collective care and mutual transformation. Against the fragmenting pressures of capitalism, they argue that solidarity requires more than simply working alongside one another. ‘If we are fighting together,’ they write, ‘we need to try and like, in fact, love each other, too.[3]’ That idea feels particularly resonant within the current cultural landscape. Against the forces that seek to isolate, divide and exhaust us, friendship offers a way of remaining connected to one another and to the possibility of collective life. At a time when artists are routinely encouraged to compete for shrinking opportunities and resources, friendship can begin to feel like a radical act. Behind every exhibition, publication and project lies a web of relationships and acts of generosity that rarely receive recognition. Friendship is not separate from cultural production; it is often what sustains it.

If BIG LOVE asks us to take love seriously, then perhaps it also asks us to take friendship seriously, not as a lesser relation, but as a practice of solidarity.

At this moment in time, Leeds is a microcosm of what is happening elsewhere across the UK. Cultural institutions are shrinking and closing, and many queer and grassroots spaces face a similarly uncertain future. This is why venues such as Hyde Park Art Club and Book Club play an increasingly important role in the city’s cultural ecosystem, sustaining the networks, relationships and opportunities upon which artistic communities depend. More than simply another exhibition venue, HPAC operates as a curatorial collective committed to supporting Northern artists. Embedded within the social and cultural life of Hyde Park Book Club, it occupies a space that sits somewhere between gallery, social venue and community hub, providing a vital site of gathering, experimentation and queer joy. It is perhaps no surprise then that an exhibition centred on love should emerge from a space built around precisely these forms of care and collective belonging.

There is something altogether quite audacious and hopeful about conceiving of an exhibition around the theme of love at this time, especially as, across both the intimate scale of everyday life and the vast scale of global crisis, we are so often witnessing the failure to extend love towards our fellow humans and the more-than-human world. Being in love, or loving, feels like both an innately optimistic and yet a hugely vital practice at this current conjuncture. BIG LOVE presents love as something that must be practised rather than assumed: contingent, imperfect, occasionally ambivalent, but necessary nonetheless. The works gathered here might be understood as propositions for how to remain open to one another rather than paralysed by the state of perma-crisis in which we find ourselves, even when conditions seem so often to foreclose the possibility of connection. Our lives are fundamentally entangled with those of others and are all the better for it.

All images courtesy of George Storm Fletcher and Hannah Guy.

BIG LOVE at Hyde Park Art Club, Leeds, UK, ran from 14th February - 14th April 2026.

[1] hooks, b. (2000) All About Love: New Visions. New York: Harper Collins, p. 200.

[2] Further information about the research here.

[3] Performing Borders e-journal here.