Painting Pansies
Painting pansies has become an occasional component of The Pansy Project. I first began depicting pansies while developing Pansy Boy, the book I wrote and illustrated. Through the book, I was able to investigate the symbolism of the pansy in a way that differed from photographing a living plant at a specific site of homophobia or transphobia. Pansy Boy used narrative and illustration to introduce the ideas and experiences behind The Pansy Project to new audiences. I drew many pansies for the book, and this became a way of investigating the character of the flower itself, particularly when depicted in isolation.
As a municipal or garden plant, the pansy is seldom seen alone. It is more commonly encountered as a jolly bank of colour in a park, a garden border or a hanging basket: an ordinary, cheerful and familiar flower. Isolated from this context, however, the pansy takes on a different presence. Its distinctive ‘face’, scale and associations become more apparent. Drawing the flower allowed me to explore this character and consider what the pansy might represent beyond its physical presence at a site.
These illustrations might have remained within the pages of a book, but in 2019 I was invited to Stavanger, Norway, to participate in the Nuart Festival. I faced a practical problem: I could not locate any living pansies to plant. Given the context of a street art festival, painting offered an appropriate alternative to planting. What began as a practical solution opened up another possibility for The Pansy Project.
For the Stavanger project, I painted a series of life-size pansies at locations where crimes had occurred (above). Rather than placing a living plant into the ground, I could place its painted equivalent directly onto the built environment. The painted pansy could occupy a wall, a corner or another architectural surface, allowing the intervention to respond to its surroundings in a different way.
This also shifted the function of the pansy within the project. A planted pansy is temporary and site-specific. It grows, flowers and eventually disappears, while the photograph records its presence. The painted pansy can remain. It can become a more permanent sign of The Pansy Project, carrying the symbolism of the flower without necessarily being tied to an individual act of planting.
In June 2026, I was invited to contribute a painted pansy to Queer Painting: Intervals, an exhibition hosted by Amici Art and curated by Chester Tenneson and Katie Tomlinson. I painted the pansy during the preview event, creating a live painting ‘performance’ that echoed my usual planting technique, in the presence of the queer community.
The process of painting allowed me to reflect on the twenty-year history of The Pansy Project while also explaining the work to visitors as the painting developed. After the exhibition came down, the occupants of the building, Project Art Works, chose to retain the painting, nestled on their windowsill, as a symbol of The Pansy Project. This experience encouraged me to think further about the possibility of the painted pansy remaining within a space, not simply as a record of an intervention, but as an ongoing presence within the community that hosts it.
The Intervention Series
The Intervention Series extends The Pansy Project into spaces where planting isn’t possible, necessary or appropriate. Each work is a unique, site-responsive intervention painted directly onto the architecture of a host space, allowing the pansy to exist as a more autonomous symbol within the project. Unlike the original plantings, these interventions are not necessarily tied to a specific act or location of homophobia or transphobia; instead, they can respond to the character, history or audience of a particular place. Painted low to the ground, they can appear as though the pansy is growing from the floor, emerging from a skirting board or finding its way unexpectedly into an architectural space. Once created, each intervention remains in situ, becoming a permanent echo of The Pansy Project and of my presence within that space.
This work can be developed for galleries, museums, LGBTQ+ spaces, universities, public buildings and other organisations, either as individual site-responsive interventions or as part of a larger presentation of the project. Each new intervention becomes part of the continuing series, while retaining the character and visual language of The Pansy Project. The earlier painted interventions developed organically from the wider project and retain their original titles; more recently, I have begun to think of these non-site-specific paintings as a distinct series, numbered sequentially as The Pansy Project: Intervention 01, Intervention 02, Intervention 03, and so on. The numbering marks the beginning of this particular series rather than the chronology of every painted pansy I have made, reflecting a point at which the painted pansy has become an autonomous form within the project: no longer necessarily responding to a specific act or location, but functioning as a recurring symbol, presence and intervention in its own right.
