Inspired by London Art Fair’s 2024 Museum Partnership with Charleston, the modernist home of painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, the 2024 Platform section of the fair brought together art that shined a light on Queer love and life selected by guest curator Gemma Rolls-Bentley. In the early 20th century, the historic house and artist studio became a Queertopia for members of the Bloomsbury Group, including Vanessa’s sister Virginia Woolf. In Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando, an imaginative biography of her lover and muse Vita Sackville-West in which the protagonist changes sex from male to female, she wrote:

“A million candles burnt in him without his being at the trouble of lighting a single one.”

At a time when LGBTQIA+ life is increasingly under threat in the UK and globally, Rolls-Bentley calls on the words of Queer Ancestors as she brought together art that reflects the resilience, the beauty and the passion of Queer love and life. 

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