Development of Duncan Grant: Worlds Through Desire: From Drawing to Cruising to DMs
Worlds Through Desire follows Voyager 2000: Worldbeing & Wonder (2025), which explored growing up autistic under technology. This project developed from conversations following that exhibition, reflecting on feedback for even more discussions of desire and including asexuality.
Here, desire is understood expansively: it can include sexual relationships, friendship, companionship, love, mentorship, knowledge-sharing and intimacy. The exhibition also questions the assumption that cruising always or only remains at sexual means, or has only sexual intentions.
A response to ongoing conversations
The project draws on fragments of research and private conversations held since 2016 between people who were all part of LGBT+ communities. It also includes informal discussions since 2025 with collectors of Duncan Grant’s art and researchers familiar with his life and work. These conversations were brought together with public material, reflective writing and anonymised stories from East Anglia.
Grant’s private exchanges offer one starting point for thinking about contemporary acts of looking, sharing, being seen, and searching, between men on dating apps to social media.
The exhibition is presented as fragments of an immersive visual and textual poem. It combines heavily edited anonymous accounts, public sources, fictionalised elements, and poetry, presented alongside Duncan Grant’s life and work and selected contemporary artworks.
The poem follows an adult character exploring different forms of desire and connection across public and online spaces between 2016 and 2026.
Artists and poets have responded to themes within the exhibition, including friendship, mentorship, companionship, social networks and intimacy.
Some anonymous artists and private collectors have also responded to Grant’s work through photographs, artworks or spoken instructions for the creation of new works.
The exhibition does not claim to represent universal LGBT+ experience. It focuses primarily on gay, bisexual, queer, and questioning men, alongside some non-binary perspectives, and considers how LGBT+ meeting spaces and creative communities have changed across physical and digital environments.
To protect privacy, personal accounts have been anonymised, edited and combined. No single story is presented as definitive.
Find out more about Duncan Grant: Worlds Through Desire: From Drawing to Cruising to DMs
Bringing together artworks, stories and poetry from three generations of voices, explore how LGBT+ people have sought friendship, community, intimacy, and desire across changing times and technologies.
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