Portraiture

The core team have worked closely with six ‘Contemporary Beauties’ whose portraits lie at the heart of a film and installation.

The Black Queer individuals Ebony Rose Dark, Son of A Tutu, Karnage Kills, Julius Reuben, Winn Austin and Le Gateau Chocolat are artists, drag queens, performers, models and activists.

The research has examined how beauty has been defined and perceived in the past and how this is reflected in – and shaped by – the nation’s heritage. Working with and rethinking ideals of beauty that have their roots in the seventeenth century and which continue to reverberate today, Permissible Beauty offers up ‘a new chapter of British beauty’ for the 21st century, through richly layered portraits of six contemporary Black Queer Britons rendered in photography, oral testimony, performance, song and sound; all brought together in a stunning film.

Contemporary photographic portraits have been created by Robert Taylor, capturing the ways in which these subjects respond to the historic collections and shifting notions of beauty. These will be included in a unique installation, to be revealed in January 2023 at Hampton Court Palace, where the full richness of the project and its underpinning research and creative outputs will be made clear.