- Ty Locke
- Intense Passion
- Royal George, Tanners Hill, London
- 16th January – 15th February 2026
- Opening 15th January 7 – 11pm
‘The glasses came in on metal trays, half-full, lipstick smeared, fag ends in claret, jagged edges on stems,’ wrote Alan Hollinghurst in The Line of Beauty (2003) describing one of the Feddens’ soirées. It is an unimportant line in an important book, preoccupied with 1980s queer culture and class division in Thatcher’s Britain. The rest of the prose is clever, witty, erotic. Yet this narratively useless line has stayed with me, stained by mind. Claret, and all. I thought of it when I encountered Ty Locke’s work for the first time.
Locke’s installation coats the exterior windows of the Royal George in layers of lipstick, appearing for a month as part of A Place to Rest, Jean Watt’s site-specific curatorial project. Its title, Intense Passion, references the Poundland lipstick from which it is made. Locke tells me he likes to imagine the pub as a cartoon figure, with lips exaggerated and coloured in, ‘I’d be making it pout’. This Deptford boozer is all dolled up!
The project emerged after Locke interrupted his sculpture studies at the Slade and received an Arts Council grant to, as he puts it, ‘learn how to be a drag queen’. The funding: ‘fifty quid and a fake wig’. He applied to a drag open-call in Margate and developed the persona Giselle Da Gere (pun on ‘do you sell gear?’), a chain-smoking, kebab-eating diva dressed in an Aldi uniform, drawn from his own retail past. At the time, Locke was making emotionally taxing, labour-intensive sculpture, alongside what he calls his ‘sexy works’: ‘horny chairs’, and leopard-print covered palettes. Bringing drag into his practice, he says, gave him ‘an excuse to talk about [his] queerness without it feeling tokenising’.
Returning to London and his studies, leaving Giselle by the sea, Locke turned to lipstick as a medium. The first iteration of Intense Passion was in 2022, a small makeup mirror, thickly coated in rouge. The idea was expanded in his graduate show the following year, where a lipstick-coated skylight flooded the gallery with shifting rosy light, changing from hot pink to a subtle blush as clouds passed across the sun. The lippies were sourced through his twin brother, who managed a Poundland branch up until the company was sold last year (for a pound!). There is something, Locke notes, ‘inherently un-camp’, ‘mundane’, and ‘real’ about getting these cosmetics from his sibling. ‘It’s also practical’ Locke continues, ‘The cheaper the lipstick, the waxier it looks. I want it to look super slimy […] and I got a discount!’
In its third iteration, Locke takes his lipstick to the pub, positioning the work within drag culture’s complex history with these spaces, which are often hostile or neglectful to queer persons. He describes how the pub’s ‘traditionally masculine exterior is matched by something coded as feminine,’ and at this scale brings to light questions of public performance, visibility, and gender. The building itself dates to 1826, and in the Victorian era the lower third of pub windows was commonly frosted as a moral ‘privacy screen’, concealing drinkers from public view. By leaving this section clear and instead coating only the upper panes, Locke inverts that logic, shifting the focus from concealment to exposure, not hiding, but making visible. Demanding presence. A subtle queering of space.
Angela Jones’ theory of queer heterotopias (2009) is useful here when speaking to the spatial and sexual politics at play. Jones builds on Michel Foucault’s distinction between utopias and heterotopias. Utopias, for Foucault, are unreal, idealised spaces that show not what is but rather what should be. Heterotopias, on the other hand, exist. They are real sites with an in-between, unsettled quality. For Jones, ‘queer utopias’ cannot exist for they are abstract portraits of ideal societies which remain hypothetical.By contrast ‘queer heterotopias’ are real sites where real actors engage in the radical politics of subversion. It is within this space that the normative configurations of sex and spatial politics are unsettled, and where Locke’s work is situated.
The patron saint of gender theory, Judith Butler, defines queer as ‘a site of collective contestation’, a tool for analysing the construction of normativity. Locke’s work is rife with contradiction: grotesque marks made by an object of beauty, glamour bought from a budget supermarket, privacy inverted through fleeting architectural interventions. Butler argues that the politically transgressive nature of queer lies in its capacity to articulate the terms of political agency, to ‘reveal that they are not neutral, but normative.’ Queer, then, is not simply a quasi-identity for sexual minorities, but an appeal to act in its name. For Locke, this is subtle, a hope ‘to get people thinking about queer people in spaces where they don’t always feel welcome.’
Planting a big queer kiss on this tavern is gentle provocation, a quiet call to action. Just as Hollinghurst’s line lingered with me, perhaps Locke’s smeared taproom will stay with you: a rouge-rimmed glassed or a tipped cig butt might call it to mind. Claret and all.
Text by Will Ferreira Dyke.
Ty Locke is an artist based in London. His work blends accessibility, wit and sexuality to respond to his position in the world. He is interested in transforming mundane objects into sculptures imbued with personality and tension, often through labour-intensive means. @tylocke.art
Will Ferreira Dyke is a writer based in London. He has written for AnOther, The World of Interiors, Ocula and Elephant. @w.lliam