Snooping Through Studios: George Storm Fletcher

George Storm Fletcher is an artist originally from Ely, in East Anglia who has been living and working in Leeds for six years. They describe themselves as a performance artist and menace who is at their best when being outrageously queer, playful, and heartfelt. Their work manifests as a series of text-based architectural interventions with a DIY aesthetic.

They have undertaken residencies at the Barbican Arts Group Trust and Blauverschiebung Festival in Leipzig, Germany. George has shown in the UK in a range of institutions and currently has a show at Hyde Park Art Club. They are coming to the end of a part-time MA at the University of Leeds.

Court Spencer caught up with George to find out more about their practice, current projects, and plans for the future.

Court: Hi George. Great to see you and thanks for your time. Let’s begin by talking about HEAVEN, your show at Hyde Park Art Club. Can you start with a bit about the film?

George: HEAVEN restages an oral history that my Mum had told me years before, whilst we were driving to Ilkley to see my grandparents, who were still alive at the time. The bypass around Guiseley and Burley in Wharfedale was shut for roadworks, so we took the old road, through all the places my Mum grew up.

Mum told me that in July 1984 she went out with some friends who used to go and see a Tina Turner tribute(ish) band. Mum was having so much fun that she missed the last bus and train home. She decided the most logical thing was to walk down Kirkstall Road, following the bus route, knowing it would eventually get to Burley in Wharfedale. She walked all the way to Guiseley from Leeds City Centre, when a florist’s van picked her up. Mum never saw the flowers, as she was in the front of the car-but she could smell them, and said that the aroma was ‘Heavenly’.

The story, and the visual imagery that it provoked, lodged itself in my brain, and in April 2023 I made a collage, hoping to make it into a film. In April 2024, we made it a reality, making HEAVEN, which is currently on display at HPBC until the end of August and available online as well.

Court: I love that it’s been lodged in your brain and you’ve been able to release it as this film! Can you talk us through the other works in the show and how this project came about?

George: Sarah Roberts – one of the founders of Hyde Park Art Club – and I met a few times at various openings in Leeds. We were talking about unrealised ideas, and Sarah suggested that maybe I could work with her and the team at Hyde Park Book Club on a solo exhibition. With the support of her and curator Benedetta D’Ettorre, I wrote an application to the Leeds Cultural Investment Fund. The idea was to make a film with my friend, the artist and videographer Ronnie Danaher, along with a van driver (Sarah Statham) and a florist (Lizzie Simpson); re-staging the story my Mum had told me years before. Hyde Park Art Club were fantastic to work with, Sarah was very encouraging suggesting I make something ambitious that would be useful to me. They didn’t demand that I make a ‘Windows’ piece for the space, despite this being what I am known for, and they gave me free rein to explore film.

The exhibition space in HPBC contains a large vinyl collage of stills from the film, a large text piece on decorators’ dust sheets that says MY LUCK WAS ABOUT TO CHANGE, in pink and purple vinyl matt emulsion, and a screen showing the film on a loop, with headphones and a transcript. Elsewhere in the space is a postbox for people to submit stories about Kirkstall Road, which I will bind into a book and create an ISBN for–this will be archived in Leeds City Library when the exhibition is over, creating a legacy for the project.

Court: The ‘Windows’ pieces were the first works of yours that I came across at theLeeds Artists Show at Leeds Art Gallery. There is so much scope with that body of work. How did it initially come about?

George: I was moving out of my Burley back-to-back in October 2020, to move to Leipzig for an Erasmus year abroad. The timing wasn’t brilliant because of Covid, and my Dad had died very suddenly a few weeks before. But this was the last opportunity for funding so I knew it would be my only chance to live in Germany. The house in the first ‘Windows’ piece was the second place I had ever lived as I didn’t live in halls at university. With cardboard and emulsion, I wrote a statement for every window of my house, taped them to the interior of the window and photographed it from across the street. When I saw what I had made I was really moved. I knew I was onto something! It was a turning point in my career – my practice became much more committed and channelled after that. The windows and the phrases were all I could think about.

Court: Where do you make these? You must need a lot of space.

George: I make them wherever I can! I always work on the floor. Sometimes I have studio space and sometimes I work in my living room. I made the panels for NOBODY WANTS TO WORK ANYMORE in my old living room. The piece was 25m wide, and the emulsion bled through onto the floorboards. It took me longer to scrub the red paint from the floor than it did to paint it. Thankfully I moved shortly after so I didn’t have to look at my mistake every day!

The piece for Heaven, MY LUCK WAS ABOUT TO CHANGE, was painted in the garden at the front of my current back-to-back. To some extent, the floorspace that I have available dictates how the pieces are fabricated, whether I work in individual panels, or on larger dust sheets. At the moment I have a studio until I graduate from my MA so I am making lots of plans for big work, while it is logistically straightforward, I don’t like having to lay out plastic as it kills the spontaneity of the making, and emulsion smells like fish if it sweats on plastic sheeting!

Court: That doesn’t sound so pleasant! Do you think the audience or their response to a piece has an impact on the way you process the topics that you’re raising?

George: I used to think so, but now I disagree. I don’t think work ‘raises awareness’, and if it does, I am not sure what that does? When the second ‘Windows’ piece Force Your Parents to Make Funeral Plans was being exhibited at the Royal Academy and Leeds Art Gallery, people started coming up to me telling me about their dead relatives, and I just knew this wasn’t really what the work was about. I am not entirely sure where the content of the piece came from; unlike lots of my other work it isn’t an ‘overheard’ phrase, it is mine–and although it could be seen as a pressuring political statement, which of course it is, I am not on a personal crusade to make people go to funeral directors. Though hilariously, a funeral parlour has purchased one of my editions, and it is hanging in a window in Chiswick! It’s much more a mental preparation, than a capitalistic one of ‘getting one’s affairs in order’, a kind of ‘live for now’ statement.

I thought it would be funny when I made that, but it really wasn’t at all when I saw it up at my Mum’s bungalow. My mentality is that once I’ve made the work, it isn’t really up to me to dictate what that means for my audience, it’s out of my control. I don’t think I would make anything at all if I worried about how people are interpreting it. My job is the making alone, I don’t even write descriptions anymore, just materials, locations, and dates.

Court: How do you find the right location to match with the text? Do you have possible texts in mind and you’re just always looking for a location that feels right?

George: I stopped making the ‘Windows’ works for a while because I realised they can’t just be generated to fit any space. The phrase comes first, and then the building slowly comes into focus. For example, I knew that The Second Rule of Assertiveness was always going to be ‘I CAN TAKE MY TIME TO MAKE A DECISION,’ but it was only when I remembered the architectural history of the tower block at my secondary school that I knew where the text belonged. I don’t really draw, but I collect things and write them down, mentally and in lots of little notebooks. Generally, the ‘Windows’ pieces that get made are things that enter my brain and don’t go away until I find somewhere for them to visually live, temporarily or not, finding permanence in the photographs and the lightboxes.

Court: Your Mum was absolutely brilliant in the film HEAVEN! And I think you said that you use magnolia paint in your work and that may have come from your Dad who was a painter and decorator. Can you tell us a little about your parents and how they’ve impacted your practice?

George: My Mum is one of the best speakers I know. She is deliberate and precise in her word choice which is why she’s so funny. She naturally has the perfect dry humour that so many people try to learn. Mum is very creative, my biggest fan and my harshest critic. She instilled in me confidence and self-belief that I could do anything.

My Dad had a very different sense of humour, he was much cruder, and less timeless. He wasn’t particularly creative but loved the things that he enjoyed very intensely. He was quite an obsessive man, and the things he enjoyed were integral to his identity in a way that is less common now. I think it’s because he was a Mod in the 1960s, that subculture was so formative that he never grew out of it. I was surrounded by a very 90s British aesthetic growing up. I am the child of ‘older parents’, which in my mind just means I have better taste in music! 5pm television game shows, getting back from work and changing into your best jeans to go to the pub for a Carlsberg, bungalow culture. Ben Sherman shirts, Radio 4, Anecdotal conversation, sitting and eating together, a good gossip and of course magnolia–which I think sums it all up, the good and the bad, nicotine yellow.

Because I make work that involves text, and storytelling–it is inevitable that the people who have formed me, and who I lived with for 18 years+ will be present. I try to be quite truthful about where my ideas come from, removing some of the shroud of mystery that other people seem to create about their processes.

Court: As you come to the end of your MA, have you got any plans for the future?

George: I am staying in Leeds, but that’s about all I know. I am going to make a book about working in the only licensed sex shop in Leeds City Centre, where I currently have a part-time job, and I know I need to find a studio for my sanity (and that of my housemates). I would like to carry on my research, perhaps in PhD form, but the making is the main priority, hopefully, I’ll hit the big time and be able to live like this forever.

Court: Hitting the big time brings us nicely to my final few questions. I always like to ask people what their career highlight has been thus far?

George: Seeing my work on the wall of the Royal Academy (2022) was pretty knockout, and I had many a cameo in Joe Lycett’s documentary that year too which was funny. But I think seeing so many people that I respect at Hyde Park Book Club, enjoying my film in the Snug, laughing and crying at all the right moments was the highlight. There were so many interesting people there that I hardly ever get to talk to and that they were all there to see my work was unbelievably exciting. I was proud of what I had made that night, but it was a bit scary having my relationship with my Mum so on show. But I think that as a young trans person, it is still pretty radical to show something so positive and prove that optimism is something people will come out on a rainy Tuesday to see!

The atmosphere that night was fantastic, it really reminded me why Leeds is home, people are supportive and want you to do well here. The whole process of making HEAVEN has been mint, working with curators (Sarah and Benedetta) who had utter faith in my vision, even when I didn’t, getting my first public funding, working with Ronnie Danaher who is talented and brilliant, it’s been ace and I would happily do it all again. It’s given me confidence in my ideas, the film came out of a conversation and a collage!

Court: I was there that night, and I completely agree, Leeds is full of incredible people who want to see each other do well. Do you have a dream project you would love to make happen?

George: Longtime followers will know my answer here: I have been working on a DIY opera, my Sad or Dead, opus for over 5 years now. I have the storyboarding, and at one point I had a life-size cardboard bus ready to go. I have been looking for two singers and the right moment. Perhaps when I am in my post-graduation breakdown I’ll return to it. I was imagining a three-part DIY operetta, where the story is repeated but the endings are different, I think it would be really cool–If anyone wants to give me some money?

Court: I think it’s so important to throw things out into the universe and let people know how they can help you. I hope someone does fund that because I would love to see it! Are there any other shows coming up where we can see more of your work?

George: My MA show opens on the 3 September with the private view on Thursday 5 Sept, 5-9pm. It runs until the Sunday evening at the School of Fine Art, University Road, University of Leeds. It’s going to be called Fat Baby, and I’m making all new works fort his. I will have a solo show on the second floor, with lightboxes, text works and a new series of photogravure etchings. Its going to be bonkers, I am excited to show everybody. You can follow that show at @bat_faby, all the details will be on there, and I will be posting about it too.

Court: And what’s the best way for people to keep an eye on what you’re doing, Instagram?

George: Definitely Instagram, I am @georgeartgreg, on both Insta and Vimeo, where I post all my film works, including HEAVEN. I also have a mailing list that people can signup to by writing to [email protected].

Court: Fab! Thanks George. It’s been brilliant to chat and I look forward to seeing your MA show and that operetta!