Meet Conor Collins: Queer Up North Commission

An interview with Conor Collins

Conor Collins was the selected artist for the HOME-Queer Up North visual arts commission and will be exhibiting new work in the Granada Foundation Galleries in July 2026. We caught up with Conor to discuss what this opportunity means to him and what we can expect from the commission when it is exhibited in July.

You have recently been selected for the HOME & Queer Up North visual arts commission. Can you tell us a bit about yourself as an artist and your practice?

I’m Conor Collins a self-taught queer artist from Manchester. I like being self-taught as I don’t know if I studied art I might have been told ‘Pick a lane, darling. Stay there.’ So I never did. I like to approach art the way an actor approaches a role. If someone plays a murderer in one film, we don’t lock them in a cupboard afterwards and say, ‘Well. That’s you forever now. Murder only.’

But artists? People love a label. The graffiti person. The paint drip person. The mosaic person. It’s almost as if creativity should behave itself. As if art should arrive wearing sensible shoes and a name badge.

There’s nothing wrong with having a signature style. Some artists find a language and spend a lifetime perfecting the accent. Beautiful. I’m just more interested in translation.

I want the subject to decide the form. I want the idea to dictate the material. I want the work to tell me what it needs.

Which means over the years I’ve made work with HIV-positive blood, tweets, love-heart sweets, and recently in a moment of tremendous personal growth… acrylic paint.

I think art should stay alive. A little unpredictable. A little difficult to categorise. Like people, really.

What attracted you to this opportunity?

Manchester is my home, not just geographically but emotionally, socially and creatively. It’s the city that taught me how to be loud, and strange, and visible.

Queer people are my community. I was moulded here. In bars and galleries and basements and smoke breaks and after parties. In knowing looks. In survival. In campness deployed as both weapon and lifeboat.

I’ve always lived in the arts, even when I couldn’t afford to… in fact especially then. As artists, we get very used to rejection. You apply for opportunity after opportunity with a kind of glamorous delusion, like repeatedly proposing marriage to the world. Occasionally the world replies, but mostly it develops a sudden interest in somebody else.

So, when I applied for the HOME & Queer Up North commission, I did it with all the hope in the world and absolutely none of the expectation. But God, I wanted it. Because the themes inside Queer Up North run through so much of my work. Identity. Memory. Queerness. Shame. Joy. Performance. Survival. The beautiful theatre of becoming yourself in public. It didn’t feel like forcing myself into somebody else’s vision. It felt like recognition. Like finding a door already half open.

Honestly, it felt less like applying for a commission and more like finally shouting at a friend in the distance and seeing them turn back to see me and smile.

What and how has the process been so far and has anything surprised you?

It’s been an artistic defibrillator.

The last few years I’ve had a kind of artist’s block. I was still making work. Constantly. But somewhere underneath it I kept thinking, ‘No. Not quite. Not alive yet’, and I worried, genuinely worried, that I’d get this opportunity and have nothing to say. That I’d finally be handed this extraordinary archive, and my brain would respond by quietly leaving the building.

Instead, the exact opposite happened. I’ve gone through the archive like a man possessed. Absolutely devoured it. There are notes everywhere now in my flat, papers, scribbles, frantic half-sentences. Ideas breeding like bunny rabbits.

But it’s been a joy. A genuine joy. Looking through this world. I never personally got to experience these performances, protests, photographs, voices, moments and realising how easily all of it could have disappeared. Because queer history is fragile.

Not weak.

Fragile.

There’s a difference.

So much of it survives because somebody cared enough to keep the flyer. To save the programme. To document the night. To remember.

And what struck me most, maybe not surprised me, exactly, but moved me was the sheer boldness of it all.

This was before social media. Before influencers. Before visibility became content. There were no algorithms rewarding outrage and no carefully curated identities with ring lights and affiliate links.

These artists were fearless. Brave enough to be strange publicly. Brave enough to be queer publicly. Bold enough to make difficult work. Unapologetic enough to take up space when the world was still trying to pretend they didn’t exist.

Brave and bold are the words I keep coming back to.

What ideas and themes are you exploring for your upcoming exhibition?

At the moment, my brain feels like it’s hosting several conversations at once. Some beautiful. Some heartbreaking. Some shouting over each other in sequins with half a fag dangling out their mouth. There is so much inside this archive. So many lives refusing to sit quietly in the past.

Identity keeps surfacing again and again. Not identity as a tick box. Identity as survival. As performance. As invention. As something negotiated daily between the self and the world staring back at it.

One such story I can’t get out of my head is that of the story of Deborah Cheetham, taken from her Aboriginal family at just three weeks old and raised in a white Christian household as part of Australia’s Stolen Generation. That fracture. That dislocation. Then the extraordinary act of reclaiming voice through music.

Then there’s Della Grace performing masculinity and femininity not as opposites, but as possibilities. Who’s work and our life challenged the rigid idea that identity.

I keep coming back to bravery too, and the boldness of queer performance. People standing nude on stages singing, performing poetry, making comedy. Not apologising, not asking permission to exist. There’s something deeply moving about that level of visibility in a world where invisibility is the norm. After all, heaven forbid someone look at you on the tram, or a someone with a clip board approach you on market street.

I think one of the biggest themes emerging for me is this idea that archives extend lives. Not the first life, not the heartbeat. The final life. The life that exists in memory, in stories, in photographs, in ticket stubs somebody accidentally kept in a drawer for thirty years. I keep thinking about how we die twice, once when we take our final breath and again when our final story is told for the last time. An archive interrupts that second death. It says: ‘No. Not yet. They were here.’

Alongside the joy and celebration, there’s fear running through it too. Homophobia. The HIV epidemic. Loss sitting constantly in the corner of the room like background noise. Yet people still created, still loved, still performed and still laughed. That tension feels incredibly important to me. The coexistence of celebration and grief. Of terror and glamour. Of death and absolute, outrageous life.

This archive feels priceless because it doesn’t just preserve events, it preserves humanity. Messy, brave, funny, frightened, complicated humanity.

Without giving too much away, how would you like your work to be received by members of the public?

Put simply, ‘To see and be seen’.

I hope it makes people think about what it really means to see somebody. Not to glance at them or categorise them in under three seconds like a bored customs officer. Truly see them and beyond that what it means to *be* seen.

For queer people, visibility is complicated.

Sometimes it’s liberation.

Sometimes it’s danger.

Sometimes it’s performance.

Sometimes it’s exhaustion.

I think we spend huge parts of our lives negotiating how much of ourselves the world gets access to. Editing. Translating. Softening edges. Or, occasionally, setting the whole thing on fire and arriving on the outside exactly how you are on the inside.

I don’t necessarily want audiences to leave with neat answers, art that behaves too perfectly rarely stays with you. But I’d love people to leave thinking about the lives inside the archive and the people and stories that come from it differently. Not as history, not as ‘those people back then’, but as human beings who wanted what everybody wants really. To love, to express themselves, to survive, to be remembered, and to be seen properly before the lights go out.

More information about the Queer Up North Visual Arts Commission

You can experience Conor Collins’ exhibition in the Granada Foundation Galleries from the 8th of July 2026.

The Granada Foundation Galleries are a dynamic and ever-evolving space for contemporary visual art at HOME, designed to bring thought-provoking work that challenges perspectives and invites conversation into the heart of our building.

The Granada Foundation Galleries programme is at the heart of our Artist Development programme, spotlighting emerging artists making new work, developing their practice and showcasing their artworks to HOME’s audiences.

You can find our more about Conor here: https://www.conartworks.com/portraits-by-conor-collins

Queer Up North 1992–2002: Celebrating Manchester’s LGBTQ+ Heritage

Recently supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund and The Granada Foundation, the project aims to preserve and celebrate the cultural history of the Queer Up North Festival, culminating in autumn 2026 with a new website, digital archive, and a series of events at HOME, Contact, and Manchester Central Library. Queer Up North Festival was one of the most pioneering and influential LGBTQ+ arts festivals in the UK and Europe. Established in 1992 by Tanja Farman and Gavin Barlow as part of the Manchester Festival, QUN quickly became a beacon for queer culture, drawing artists and audiences from across the globe. Over its first decade, the festival showcased groundbreaking performances and played a pivotal role in shaping Manchester’s identity as an inclusive and vibrant LGBTQ+ city.

Credits

Presented by Manchester Histories and Queer Up North with support from Archives+, Manchester City Council, HOME, Contact, Manchester Literature Festival and Factory International