How Gemma Rolls-Bentley Curates Exhibitions That Feel Like Home
Published on elephant.art.
A Tom of Finland print and a postcard of the Virgin Mary greet me at the entrance of Gemma Rolls-Bentley’s home. Children’s shoes and cowboy boots are scattered around the staircase, above which hangs a framed poster for Dreaming of Home, the exhibition she curated at the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York two years ago. Catherine Opie’s Self-Portrait/Cutting, reproduced here, was the starting point for the show. “It’s an image of her back with a drawing of two stick figures in dresses, with a house and clouds and birds in the background, cut into her skin,” Rolls-Bentley describes. “It’s a very raw image, but it has this childlike quality to it.” The work was seminal for Opie, but it was equally personal and pivotal for Rolls-Bentley: “I saw it when I was young, in my early twenties, when I’d just come out. That image represented feelings that I had, and still have to some degree, around longing for some kind of stability — a version of home, domesticity, family — that as a queer person didn’t necessarily feel available. That dream felt like something quite painful,” she adds, “and her image encapsulates that.”
I sink into her soft leather sofa, beneath walls adorned to the ceiling with artworks by Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, Jenna Gribbon, Gray Wielebinksi, Franko B, Sola Olulode, Cash Frances, and Dominic Myatt. At the far end of the kitchen, catching the light that streams through the wide glass garden doors is a small school of tissue-paper fish made by her two children, delicate and floating in place. “I have a four and a six-year-old, and seeing the world through their eyes is amazing,” Rolls-Bentley tells me. “It’s a total revelation, realising that people come into this world without any prejudice, just full of joy and ready to find it in everything.”
For Dreaming of Home, Rolls-Bentley placed Opie’s image in dialogue with that of a group of twenty contemporary artists whose work contemplates the concept of home through queer and trans perspectives. The exhibition spoke to just how expansive, complex, and at times dissonant this idea can be: “Home might mean some version of a domestic ideal. Perhaps it’s about family — chosen family or rejection from it. It might be about finding ways to feel at home in your own body, or it may involve movement and migration,” she notes. The show deepened Rolls-Bentley’s understanding of how an exhibition can offer space for visitors to “find themselves and their people,” particularly amid the closures of traditional LGBTQ+ venues, clubs, and bars over the last decade. “There was a moment where queer people were seeking a sense of home because those spaces had offered unconditional acceptance,” Rolls-Bentley explains. Alongside a resurgence of queer venues in recent years, museums and galleries have increasingly stepped into that space and hosted queer events. “A lot of people felt like the space we created became a kind of extension of these homes — one journalist called it a spiritual homecoming, which moved me so much. Every time I was in the galleries, I would notice different people — older gay men or young, gender-nonconforming visitors — spending time with the art.”
The value of intergenerational interactions and the artistic, cultural, and political dialogues they create, Rolls-Bentley finds, is threefold: remembrance, tribute, and reparation — all vital to the survival of queer communities. “Ever since the Stonewall riots gave birth to the global Pride movement, things have moved very quickly — sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Much of the destructive rhetoric and divisive language around children and grooming with which the media targets trans people today,” she says, “is very similar to what was used decades ago to target gay men during the HIV/AIDS crisis. It’s important to stay connected to those histories to support these people, but also to see how they survived those experiences.” LGBTQ+ artists have historically not had opportunities for their work to be celebrated in mainstream art spaces, especially when it engaged with their identities. “Even when artists have such explicit queerness in their work, like David Hockney, that isn’t something that has been focused on,” Rolls-Bentley points out. “Part of the work that I’m doing as a curator and a writer involves applying a queer lens to some of that historical art.” Likewise, the work of Ajamu X — whose image Power Drill Heels features on the front cover of Rolls-Bentley’s book, Queer Art: From Canvas to Club, and the Spaces Between — remains underrepresented because of its explicit queerness.
Have the years Rolls-Bentley spent researching and writing Queer Art influenced her curatorial approach? “I would say my curatorial practice very much influenced the book — so the other way around!” she laughs. “The formal arrangement is not chronological; it’s organised in acts and chapters of quite broad concepts, like love, visibility, and the club.” Covering the last six decades, the book takes a relatively concise view of time, but each themed chapter includes work that spans the entire period. A book like this didn’t yet exist, and a broad overview felt necessary, but within each chapter, readers encounter a nuanced and intergenerational exploration of queer experience. “These themes are relatable for anyone, and art can be a powerful way of bringing people together, sharing queer experience, and helping an audience gain different perspectives. Placing older artwork next to brand new work also brought out different themes that I might not have thought of at first. It provided opportunities to consider what has changed, or what may have stayed the same, during that period.”
Dreaming of Home has continued to shape Rolls-Bentley’s intentions in creating an exhibition; even in shows that are not explicitly about the domestic space, themes of queer home, belonging, and transformation persist. For Sea State, she and Simon Oldfield brought Maggi Hambling and Ro Robertson into dialogue with each other, the sea, and Wolterton Hall for its inaugural exhibition; an eighteenth-century home filled with art, this is the first time the house and estate are open to the public. “Maggi and Ro were the first two artists that came to mind,” Rolls-Bentley tells me. “They both have a deep, deep relationship with the sea. Simon had also been thinking of them both, so it was quite synchronous how it came together.”
For decades, Hambling began her days on the beach, drawing the sea. “The way that she paints the sea is about capturing a feeling — she often talks about painting the sound of the sea,” Rolls-Bentley says. “I feel like she understands it better than most people.” Occupying Wolterton’s Portrait Room is Time, a tender installation that remembers Hambling’s late partner, artist Tory Lawrence. “Tory died on a Saturday night, and on Sunday morning, Maggi went into her studio and began to paint this piece. She said to me, Oh, that just painted itself. I had nothing to do with it.” Forty small paintings of the sea radiate from a portrait of Lawrence on her deathbed, as if she is being carried out to the water, engulfed by waves. It is an intimate reflection on love and loss, and the persistent power of the natural world that continues its rhythms despite it all. “Everyone who has walked into that installation has sat in silence and been so moved. I feel so honoured to have had the opportunity to present it. It’s truly one of the most incredible installations I have ever seen.”
Robertson also shares a close relationship with the sea and makes much of their work along the shoreline. All of the pieces featured in the exhibition are new, including The Swell — a two-metre-tall, site-specific painted steel sculpture designed for Wolterton’s Marble Hall, which, as Rolls-Bentley explains, “speaks to Ro’s family history of dock workers. The openings and voids between the waves that they’ve created shift in appearance as you walk around them. It captures this sense of possibility that the natural world offers. Maggi has been a major inspiration for Ro,” she goes on, “so it’s been wonderful to have them exhibit together — to witness them meet for the first time, and the conversations and mutual respect that they shared.”
Within an industry that aims for elitism, exclusion, and opaqueness, this shared sense of connection, collaboration, and support is the all too rare and radical through-line in Rolls-Bentley’s curatorial work. “I need to know that an exhibition is always going to be valuable for the artist, but also meaningful for audiences. The crux of my role is often being the middleman who helps a gallery or institution understand how they can support the artist and help them articulate what they want. Artists should be able to focus on making their work and not have to worry about the rest of it,” she notes. Cardion Arts, a non-profit organisation she helped to establish last year, embodies this ethos. While raising funds for queer and trans youth experiencing homelessness, it hosts a programme that foregrounds LGBTQIA+ artists, at the heart of which is an annual exhibition, co-curated by Rolls-Bentley and a guest curator. This year, she invited E-J Scott: “I’ve been a fan and, well, in awe of the work of the Museum of Transology since their show in Brighton ten years ago,” she tells me. “While we were discussing the exhibition, E-J and I noticed a lot of the artists that we were in dialogue with were thinking about the tokens, symbols, and people they turn to to feel safe.” The outcome of these long, intimate conversations and studio visits is Talisman, a group exhibition that explores the richness of symbolic defence and sacred personal objects, examining the spiritual, collective, and creative resilience of queer communities in the face of fear, harm, and existential threats.
Alongside selected objects from the Museum of Transology’s collection — selected by Scott for their talismanic properties to the donors — the artist line-up features both established names, such as Jesse Darling and Lubaina Himid, as well as emerging but equally compelling artists. Their works range in scale and medium much as they do in theme; Prem Sahib’s Obsidian Mirror III.VIII, a polished black altarpiece that cradles a tealight, invites a small, devotional moment for contemplation, its jagged, imperfect surface bearing the scars of its formative process. Emily Witham’s Butch Femme Forever, meanwhile, is an ode to lesbian love: a plane of smooth leather, hand-embossed with studs in the style of sailor tattoos and complete with metallic sparrows, hearts, and ribbons.
Amid a career spent caring for and platforming others, I wonder if Rolls-Bentley has a personal talisman she returns to in order to sustain herself. “I get a lot of power from the art I’m lucky enough to live with, and there are rituals that are important to me, like my Friday morning yoga class,” she shares. “My family and chosen family all come together as a real force of joy and support. I often joke that my children have no idea how lucky they are to be growing up in this house that’s full of brilliant people!” Turner Prize nominee Rene Matić and singer-songwriter Campbell King are, as she calls them, her “adult kids — we all spent Christmas together. Their work and creative practices inspire me so much.” But Rolls-Bentley’s biggest inspiration is her wife, Danielle Wilde, a writer, poet, and dementia specialist. “There’s a lot of overlap in what we’re thinking about — we share ideas, we share books. I just borrowed McKenzie Wark’s Raving from her, in which she’d underlined certain bits, and one of the lines has become the title of an exhibition I’m working on,” she adds with a smile, leaving it at that.