Flaming faggot
Ian Stone's meticulously rendered still life and figurative paintings explore queer memory and camp through carefully arranged collections of ornamental and personal objects, with the body positioned as a site through which identity is formed, expressed, and remembered. Informed by traditions of 19th-century Realism and Western art history, his oil paintings and drawings are rich in detail and cultural awareness, reflecting how femininity, longing, and performance shape contemporary queer life. Paintings are unframed, while works on paper are framed under glass.
Artist's description:
A bundle of sticks bound and set alight rests on a table. The phrase names both the object and the insult—language once used to reduce queer bodies to fuel. Here, the slur is returned to its literal origin, exposing how casually violence entered speech, and how speech prepared bodies for harm.
The table is not neutral. Across history it has been a site of gathering and division: where meals were shared, faith rehearsed, sentences passed, and belonging granted or denied. It is where devotion and cruelty often occupied the same surface. Placed here, the fire is no longer spectacle but evidence—contained within the domestic and the ritual.
What burns is not only wood, but the ideas that made such burning imaginable. The table holds the aftermath, insisting that this history occurred not only in distant punishment but within ordinary spaces, amid daily acts of belief, labor, and care.
- Ian Stone, 2025
