Memory, desire, survival
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 hand opens to reveal a butterfly resting in the palm. The gesture is gentle, deliberate, familiar. The body remembers how to hold what is fragile.
The butterfly carries memory: lives encountered, lost, brushed against and carried forward. It carries desire - not as spectacle, but as something intimate and persistent, shaped by risk and longing. What remains in the hand is not transformation, but continuity. Survival appears here not as triumph, but as practice. It lives in attention, in care, in the act of holding without ownership or force. The hand does not claim the butterfly; it keeps it for a moment.
Memory, desire, survival are not separate states. They coexist - quietly - in the body, in what is remembered, in what is still wanted, and in what continues, even when it must be carried gently and let go.
-Ian Stone, 2025
