Home is where one starts
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:
Three dead butterflies lie scattered across a table, their bodies distinct and unarranged. They are not offered as symbols of martyrdom, but as remains—what is left after movement, after brightness.
Above them, a fragile bubble hangs suspended. Within its surface, a house is reflected: small, intact, and distant. The image is fleeting and distorted, held only for a moment before disappearance.
Nearby, a thin strand of smoke rises from a fading ember, marking something recently extinguished. What gathers here is not a scene of loss alone, but of formation. Home appears not as refuge, but as first contact—where wonder and danger coexist, where bodies learn their contours, and where memory begins before language does.
The work suggests that what survives is shaped early. Not by catastrophe alone, but by the quiet conditions of origin: what was seen, what was inhaled, what lingered long enough to leave a trace.
- Ian Stone, 2025