Talk: Queering Edward Lear

Friday 11 November

2pm – 3pm

Booking essential, FREE

Ikon

Artist John Yeadon considers Lear’s ambivalence towards the picturesque tradition, producing landscapes that are strange rather than sublime. He compares Lear’s nomadic life to other Victorian travellers such as Lord Leighton and Richard Francis Burton who also travelled to escape the repressive laws on sexuality in Britain.

Introduced by SHOUT Creative Producer Channi Dorset, the talk will start in Edward Lear: Moment to Moment and then move into the Shout Festival Showcase where Yeadon will explore the relationship between his own paintings and a queer art history.

About the artist

Over five decades years, John Yeadon’s practice has explored issues of politics, sexuality, food, national identity, the grotesque and carnival. Essentially a painter and printmaker, who also experiments with digital and photographic techniques, Yeadon embraces the pornographic, humorous, oppositional, disquieting, difficult, obsessive and unfashionable.

Yeadon has exhibited nationally and internationally with solo exhibitions at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow, the Royal Festival Hall, London, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, Vilma Gold, London, Phoenix, Brighton and The National Museum of Computing, Bletchley Park.

Organised to coincide with Ikon’s exhibition Edward Lear: Moment to Moment which is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), The Finnis Scott Foundation and University of Oxford.

Image credit: John Yeadon Self Portrait, 2022