We were together, I forgot the rest
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 description:
This painting introduces the body directly into the still life. A tattooed hand holds a small bouquet of peonies - flowers marked by contradiction. In many Eastern traditions, peonies are associated with masculinity and vitality; in Western contexts, they are linked to femininity and sincere regret. Held together, they reflect the unstable ways queer bodies have been named, disciplined, and desired.
The gesture is intimate and unresolved, neither fully offering nor withholding. The hand bears the marks of lived experience, asserting a contemporary queer presence within a space that has historically erased such bodies. What enters the scene is not symbolic innocence, but an embodied self that has endured and remains.
Smoke, which recurs throughout the series, functions here as memory rather than spectacle - the residue of past burning that lingers in the body. Butterflies drift nearby as witnesses rather than martyrs, no longer drawn to flame. Soft points of light punctuate the darkness like embers or votive candles, transforming the space into something between shrine and night sky.
The work suggests that survival is not only about enduring fire, but about what follows: the body’s capacity to remember, to hold beauty, and to persist with tenderness.
-Ian Stone, 2025
