George Storm Fletcher practises what they preach with BIG LOVE
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
George Storm Fletcher works with big feelings. They paint words, rewire objects, and turn everyday materials into something loaded. Working out of Leeds, their practice sits somewhere between DIY intervention and emotional oversharing; pulling from memory, language, and the stuff people usually overlook. Their latest project, BIG LOVE, takes that same energy and scales it up: part exhibition, part book, part open invitation. We caught up with Storm to talk about love, access, and why working with, and sharing the work of, others matters just as much as making the work itself.
Hi George! Before we get into BIG LOVE, tell us who you are and what you do:
My name is George Storm Fletcher (b.1997) I’m a performance artist and Menace, originally from Ely, in East Anglia.
I’ve been living, and loving working in Leeds since 2018. My work usually manifests as text-based architectural interventions with a DIY aesthetic. I predominantly use Vinyl Matt Emulsion, ie. commercial wall paint and found objects, offering new voices and narratives for domestic objects like used decorator’s dust sheets and fuse boxes. I am currently the Amanda Burton Scholar at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies part of the University of Leeds. I’m undertaking a practice-based PhD, which means my research is both written and also formed of art making.
My project is called 'Magnolia: Trade, Improvement and the Monochrome,’ and it re-situates the infamous shade of off-white, Magnolia, into social Art History. I have a studio at Serf in the centre of Leeds, and all of my work is as manual and hands-on as I can make it.
I'd love to firstly chat about your own work. It seems deeply personal: how does your background shape the work you make?
It is entirely inseparable from it, like everybody I am a product of everything I have ever seen and experienced. I know how to wire lights because my Dad taught me to, I know how to curate artwork because my social group is made up of a plethora of brilliant artists.
I’m from an odd place that has a changing sense of identity, and an undervalued and lost folk history, perhaps this means I notice discarded narratives more, perhaps it just means I use strange slang and mumble when I speak.
To some extent, I can’t even answer this question, because I have no idea what kind of work I would be making were I to have been born to different parents in a different place at a different time - but I do always think it is naive when artists pretend this has nothing to do with the work they make - it has everything to do with it!
Tell us about BIG LOVE. What made you want to focus around the idea of love?
Selfishly, I had an idea for a piece of work called 2M, which is on display in the exhibition - it is an old fuse box rewired with addressable LEDS (which are lights that you can program to do different actions/ colours/ timings), the text says ‘2 more minutes,’ it flashes every second like an alarm clock, and changes from red to pink every two minutes.
The team at Hyde Park Art Club asked if I wanted to curate an exhibition for February and after seeing Jill McKnight’s drawing ‘life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards,’ I decided it should revolve around love, and launch on Valentine’s weekend. Originally it was going to be 14 artists on the walls to mark this, but we received 163 submissions from the Open Call - and so we expanded this to 30.
You can’t call a show BIG LOVE and then make it an exclusionary exhibition.
Often as an artist you have ideas for works and are waiting for the right time to make them - the BIG LOVE show came around at the right time and meant I could share the artwork I wanted to, whilst providing a space for other people to do the same.
What does “big love” mean to you personally?
80 artists are included in the BIG LOVE book - so around 50% of the applicants were included, which is far above average percentages for an Open Call. Therefore we enacted the idea of BIG LOVE through the curation and selection of works. This gesture is what BIG LOVE means to me I suppose, practising what you preach - telling people that they mean something to you actively, not passively. Respecting the fact that people applying to the Open Call will have taken time and required a sharing of something close to themselves.
Why was it important to open the project up to other artists through an open call?
My work, whilst legible and accessible to audiences, is made from my own subjective viewpoint. Love is not just something that I personally experience - it would be insane to curate an exhibition about Love and not include other people’s perspectives.
I’m a very ‘heart on sleeve’ kind of person, but some of the other artworks in the exhibition depict love in different ways - lost loves, or a love of place or community, or routine.
I suppose the use of the word BIG was to draw attention to the vastness of the concept of LOVE - I couldn’t possibly explore it entirely alone, that would be BIG SAD/BIG NONSENSICAL GESTURE.
You never know what artists are making in the city unless you open up the floor for people to show you! I’m involved with my own studio, and know people from Assembly House and East Street Arts, but I don’t necessarily know everybody making work in the city - the free Open Call meant that untrained or currently training artists, or older people across the county could contribute - and the book means that this can then be engaged with across the UK, long after the show is closed.
Love is often linked to romance, but this project looks at many different types of love. Why was that important to you?
I was feeling generous when I wrote the open call - I think it would’ve been a little bit too sickly to only include romantic love, and would encourage some kind of strange competition or comparison between the artworks. Including all the disparate versions of feeling means that we act as a strange temporary collective of LOVE - and that is a much more fun way to curate a group exhibition and book.
Speaking of the BIG LOVE book…your work often uses text and direct language. Why do you choose words as your main material?
I have the kind of memory that means that I remember exactly what people say, phrasing, word choice and all. I can remember entire conversations as if it were cinema. This is of course a good thing but also a horrible thing for me. I remember all the lovely things that I have been told, but also a lot of the less positive things that people say. Of course, I know the full context for these memories - but they function entirely differently when resituated with other materials or manifested as painted text. Text is read differently when it is written down as opposed to spoken, and the cyclical nature of listening, writing and then verbally narrating, means I can reclaim language that I hear and make it speak for me. Perhaps there is something about being gay and reusing things, perhaps it is a ‘make do and mend’ DIY attitude. The words like the fuse boxes or other materials that I use are just ‘stuff’ I have lying about to use for free…
And what does hosting this exhibition in Leeds mean to you?
Put simply, without the support of the team at Hyde Park Art Club, and the sponsorship of Jack Simpson and Hyde Park Book Club the project couldn’t have happened. When you know you have a team willing and able to support it means you can do more ambitious things - this project was enormous. Going through 163 heartfelt applications was a huge task, and required a lot of perspective and brains to do, hanging the exhibition before the Book Club opened was fun, but also a large undertaking. Curating and organising group shows is challenging even for institutions, but doing it without enormous amounts of money, but instead with good intentions and camaraderie is difficult, but massively worthwhile. I was encouraged and given the space to edit a 226 page book, and trusted to bring this to fruition ahead of the launch - an enormous vote of confidence from the HPAC team.
I really think that this inclination towards generosity is something innate to Leeds, and so BIG LOVE couldn’t really have happened anywhere else.
You’re not from Leeds, but have decided to live and work there as an artist. What does Leeds mean to you? How has Leeds shaped you as an artist?
As I said above, Leeds is a city where things that you want to happen, happen. People share what they have, and don’t gatekeep the industry in the way they do in other places - certainly not like where I am from! I couldn’t have been an artist without Leeds welcoming me the way it did.
It feels a bit like a homecoming living here, my Mum is from Yorkshire - so it has always felt really ‘right’ living here and building something for myself and my community. I’m really glad I had the opportunity to do something that platformed other artists as well as myself, the participating artists all seem really gassed to be a part of BIG LOVE, and that is more than enough for me.
It is really rare to see your artwork in print these days, so to be a part of a hardback anthology is really special - and I’m really proud of what me, Sydney Gilbride (the graphic designer) and HPAC have made.
If you want to take a piece of this exhibition home with you, you can pre-order a copy of the first pressing of the BIG LOVE book here. HPAC is a grass-roots community arts organisation that receives no funding, so picking up a copy directly supports them in continuing to make things happen in Leeds.
Talking to Storm, it’s clear BIG LOVE isn’t just a theme for an exhibition. It’s something they’ve actively built into the way they work. Opening things up, making space, keeping it generous. The project pulls in different voices, different versions of love, and lets them sit side by side without forcing a single narrative. It feels loose, human, and actually reflective of the city it came out of.
[images by Hannah Guy and George Storm]