CONFESSIONS OF A PARTY MOM, 2023
Hyde Park Art Club
supported by HPAC, Hyde Park Book Club, Leeds Inspired and Arts Council England
Show continues 19 April – 28 July 2023 (extended)
Open daily 9am – late
Emma Bentley-Fox’s work gathers beautifully still moments, energies and bodies from a position of intimate distance within Leeds’ queer community. Her lens proffers a personal and tender take on Leeds’ alternative queer party scene and communities. Bodies beating, alive, full of energy and softness.
From 18th April, at Hyde Park Book Club, ‘Confessions of a Party Mom’ will offer a glimpse at an evolving image-based analogue photographic archive. Part future-memorial and part live archive, Emma’s images of Leeds’ queer community will hold space for stories to be told, listened to, and recorded. A confessional offering kinship, vulnerability and a love letter to interdependence and solidarity.
Emma’s portraits, like their protagonists, exhibit acts of love and inevitable ‘defiance’ through existence, in what can often feel like a hostile society for those under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella. But beyond that, they are reverent, joyous and quivering in colour. A record for future selves and others.
Queer archives have often been misinterpreted, redacted, tempered, destroyed, systematically erased from society’s memory, blurred from it’s field of vision. Through her image making, Bentley-Fox questions what she believes may be a ‘specifically queer compulsion to archive, to collect’ arising from an erased or edited past. Asking ‘Can we find our way back to ourselves through the careful process of collecting, sorting, The care with which we wrap things, put them in boxes, carefully file away, carefully clean. Repair.’
Bentley-Fox, and her collaborators at Party Mom Society, cut their teeth in the basement of Hyde Park Book Club, with sweaty gatherings like anti-pageant ‘Miss The Glam Monaco International Supreme’, 2018. Their focus is on care, growth, a mutual joyful refuge, a tender space that welcomes queer, questioning and non-conforming pasts, presents and futures.
So often queer joy is relegated to attics, basements and backrooms. Confessions of a Party Mom brings these private moments up out of the basement. Most importantly it situates the parties within an ecology of care which is often missed or ignored. As essential (sometimes difficult and messy) support structure from which parties, creativity and community can bloom.
Special thanks to Lily, Kit and Courtney
& with thanks to
Oliver Getley, Adam Wright, East Street Arts, Sarah Roberts, Fresh Aire, Pictures Plus, Ingrid Banerjee Marvin.
“Time threads through the show. You talk about the immediacy of point and shoot photography during the haze of party chaos. Then the longer process of sending the film to be developed, waiting, and getting the negatives back.
You bring the audience in on the brimming excitement of that first look. When you describe the archiving process you’ve done over the past year as “an act, a performance, a gesture of care”, I imagine you in your studio, concentrating, white gloved and absorbed for hours.
You talk about the archive as a place that isn’t fixed, with no one reality. It is fluid, bending to different interpretations despite recorded details. I think about queerness, all the spaces between language, what can be found and lost in the gaps.
”
Artist and Collaborator Lily Lavorato wrote a letter in response to the show, read the letter in full below.
Venue accessibility:
The Venue is accessible from street level, via a slim doorway and small step. Unfortunately it is not easily accessible for wheelchair users. Toilets are all gender neutral. The space is a busy space so it is not alcohol free. From late afternoon to evening it can be busy, loud and host gigs. Daytime is a quieter, calmer time to visit.
Find out more about the venue and how to visit here.