What does it mean when someone spends sixty years making work that shapes a community, only for it to take another artist to finally say: this is art?
In this episode, I’m joined by artist Ian Giles and cartoonist David Shenton, two people whose creative partnership has brought an extraordinary archive of queer British history into the spotlight.
David Shenton spent decades documenting queer life in Britain through cartoons, illustrations, activism and design. He drew for publications including Gay News, Capital Gay and The Guardian, created safer-sex campaigns during the AIDS crisis, produced the world’s first LGBTQ+ graphic novel in 1983, and created the nineteen-metre banner celebrating footballer Justin Fashanu at Carrow Road. Yet for most of his career, he never described himself as an artist. It was work. It paid the mortgage. It was, as he says, cheaper than being a window cleaner.
Ian Giles is the artist who insisted on seeing it differently. His own practice is rooted in queer histories and the relationships built through collaboration, trust and care. His work has been shown at institutions including the Whitechapel Gallery, MIMA, MoMA PS1 and the Stedelijk Museum, but the heart of his practice often begins much earlier — with conversations, shared memories, cups of tea and the patient process of building relationships.
Together, they have created Kindly Ease the Tension, David’s first institutional retrospective. The exhibition brings together six decades of work that captured, challenged and celebrated queer life in Britain. It is a story that begins with a small burnt doll, knitted by a young boy in a Lancashire terrace house and thrown into the fire by his father. The doll survived. So did the boy who made it.
In this conversation, we explore what happens when somebody finally recognises the value of a lifetime’s creative work. We talk about David’s Duvet of Love, an AIDS memorial stitched in a bedsit that was never intended to become “art”, and about the importance of preserving queer histories before they disappear.
We also discuss censorship, rising conservatism within the arts, the double standards around representations of bodies and sexuality, and what intergenerational care looks like in practice. Not as an abstract idea, but through real acts of generosity: listening, showing up, sharing knowledge and creating space for someone else’s story to be heard.
This is a conversation about visibility, memory and the responsibility we have to recognise the creative contributions that have shaped the world around us. It is also a reminder that it is never too late for your work to be seen differently.
What We Learned from Ian Giles and David Shenton
What stays with me most from this conversation is the idea that being recognised can be a creative act in itself.
David spent sixty years making work that documented, challenged and celebrated queer life, yet for much of that time he never considered himself an artist. He was simply doing what needed to be done. Creating images. Telling stories. Making things that mattered to the people around him.
It took another artist, Ian, to look back at that body of work and understand what it represented. Not just a collection of drawings and objects, but an archive of a community. A record of resistance, humour, love and survival.
There is something incredibly powerful about that kind of attention. Ian did not discover David’s work by accident. He built a relationship. He listened. He stayed curious. The retrospective was not created through a single moment of inspiration, but through years of care.
And perhaps that is one of the biggest lessons from this episode. We often talk about creativity as something individual — the artist alone in the studio, making something new. But so much of creative history is built through connection. Through people who recognise something important in each other and decide to protect it.
David also offers a beautiful reminder for anyone who worries that their most important work is behind them. At seventy-seven, this retrospective has not represented an ending. It has opened up another chapter. His horizon has expanded.
The work you make when nobody is watching may become the work that explains a generation. The things created at kitchen tables, in bedrooms, in community spaces and outside the traditional systems of recognition may hold more history than we realise.
So perhaps the invitation from this conversation is simple: keep making. Keep documenting. Keep sharing. And when the time comes, be willing to pass the baton — or to receive it.
Because creative lives are not built alone. They are carried forward by the people who choose to notice, to listen and to say: this matters.
