In the smoke, the body remembers itself
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 desccription:
A family photo album lies open on the table. It belonged to my grandmother, a deeply religious woman, and within it she kept a reproduction of The Last Supper—an image held as devotion rather than illustration. Set here, the album becomes both relic and offering.
Throughout history, the table has been a site of meeting: where bodies were fed, faith was rehearsed, judgment delivered, vows made, and losses quietly counted. It is where belief enters the ordinary. Here, that surface gathers what was inherited and what was endured. Above it hangs a pearl, suspended like a measure—a symbol of purity that also reads as appraisal, watchful and unresolved. Below, a dead butterfly rests against the page, its tenderness fixed. Smoke drifts upward from what has already burned, tracing the passage between body and memory.
The table holds these elements together without resolving them. In the smoke, the body remembers not only what was believed, but how belief was lived—through touch, ritual, silence, and survival.
- Ian Stone, 2025
