Queeriosities Panel: Queer Design and Craft as an Act of Care 

Davy Pittoors is a queer independent curator, visual creative and arts organiser whose practice interrogates ideas of queer belonging and home-making by blurring the lines between art and craft, gallery and home, and archive and collection. He leverages more than a decade of applied work in crafting immersive and considered audience experiences to spark curiosity and meaning-making between artists, works and viewers. 
  

He is also the founder of Queeriosities, a bi-annual art fair and pop-up events series that seeks to support emerging queer artists while encouraging the spread of both contemporary and historical LGBTQIA+ design objects, art and vernacular ephemera. His Supper Series, led in collaboration with ceramicist Will Martin, forges queer community across the arts around site-specific themes spanning the cruising history of Hampstead Heath, the alternative queer club scene in 1990s Britain and the role of camp & kitsch in queer image making and interpretation.  

Ben Walters runs Badge Cafe, offering crafty utopian hangouts that help people relax, create and connect by making badges out of old books and magazines. For Ben, badgemaking is a refuge, a playground, a laboratory and a launchpad for better tomorrows. Badge Cafe emerges from Ben's doctoral research with Duckie, exploring the utopian capacities of queer fun and "homemade mutant hope machines". As well as sharing his research as "Dr Duckie", Ben has made documentaries, written books, produced shows and campaigned for queer spaces. From 2009 to 2013, he edited Time Out London's cabaret section.

Instagram: @badgecafe 

Website: www.badgecafe.com 

Dr Daniel Fountain is an artist, curator, and Senior Lecturer in Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter. Daniel has exhibited work on an international level, and they have co-produced a range of public programmes with organisations such as Tate, Crafts Council, and the Venice Biennale. Daniel's edited collection Crafted with Pride: Queer Craft and Activism in Contemporary Britain (2023) is the first book about queer craft and the material cultures of LGBTQ+ activism in Britain. Their monograph provisionally titled Queer Crafts is forthcoming with Bloomsbury.  

Instagram: @danielfountainart 

Twitter (X): @Daniel_Fountain 

Website: www.danielfountain.com 

Institutional Profile: https://arthistory.exeter.ac.uk/staff/fountain/ 

Jacob Monk is a hand-weaver and textile artist, having trained at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design. He now works from his studio in South East London. He’s influenced by the ancient technique of ikat - the process of creating a pattern by binding and dyeing the warp yarns before weaving. 

Jacob uses a range of rich and vibrant colours in different proportions, often inspired by nature, such as tropical plants and exotic birds. He combines ikat with other dip dyeing techniques to produce something truly original. Creating the design this way shows a sense of sporadic movement as colours change, giving the finished piece a hand-painted look. Celebrating the history and craftsmanship that goes into making an ikat fabric, Jacob also often breaks away from tradition to give his work a fresh and contemporary look. 

Instagram: @jaccobmonk 

Website: www.jacobmonk.co.uk