: Bloedd

To celebrate Pride Month this year, some of our amazing ACPs will be hosting Pride themed workshops across some of our museums this June. As part of that celebration, we asked them to reflect on the themes and inspiration behind their workshop and what Pride means to them. 

Symbolism plays a large role in queer history; a big part of this symbolism has been through the use of flowers. Whether it be a derogatory or reclaimed term or a way of signaling to other members of the community, flowers are intertwined with our history.

Violets have historically been associated with lesbianism and femininity; green carnations have been used as a way for gay men to flag each other, ‘pansy’ has been used as an insult for effeminate men, and lavender, both the colour and flower, has been used for decades as an icon of queer resistance and liberation.

Throughout the museum’s archives there are examples of this floral symbolism in protest badges and artworks, which embody the link between our history and flowers.

Violets

In the 6th century, Sappho, a poet from the island Lesbos, described her female lover as wearing a ’violet tiara’. Sappho, well-renowned for her poems, sapphic eroticism and love (indeed, she is where the word sapphic originates), influenced the language and iconography associated with lesbianism and female sexuality extraordinarily. Her use of florals in her poetry no doubt shaped queer symbolism and kinship with flowers across the following centuries.

In early 20th-century Paris, violets were a common adornment for those a part of ‘Paris Lesbos’, homosexual women who built a community with one another represented by the violets they carried, gifted each other, and were buried with.

The symbol was reborn in America when a French play being performed on Broadway, The Captive, used violets to symbolise sapphic love. In the play, a woman gifts her romantic interest a bouquet of violets; this led to outrage and scandal across New York, the play being shut down, the sale of violets plummeting and a state law dealing with ‘obscenity’ being introduced. Despite the pushback, Parisian supporters of the play wore violets on their lapels and belts.

The colour violet has also had significant presence in LGBTQ+ history, with it being present on the first pride flag– created in 1978 by artist Gilbert Baker in California, USA- and it still being present on the traditional 6-stripe rainbow pride flag and progress pride flags and many other iterations. Violet typically symbolises the spirit of the LGBTQ+ community, a fitting meaning for a symbol that has lasted and spread for over a millennium.

Pansies

In the early 20th century, there were many floral terms used to describe an effeminate (and therefore ‘gay’) man. ‘Daisy’, ‘buttercup’ but, perhaps most notably, ‘pansy’. The term ‘pansy craze’ was used to describe the underground queer nightlife and drag scene in places like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, with similar scenes being seen across European cities like London, Berlin and Paris before the rise of authoritarian politics and Nazism. The onset of the depression, the beginnings of World War II and the end of American prohibition saw an end to the short period of visibility for the LBGT community, but the icon that is the pansy has prevailed. Still occasionally used as an insult by the some, ‘pansy’ has taken on a life of its own being used as a term of endearment.

Lavender

The colour lavender has been distinctly used to represent the LGBTQ+ community in many different eras and places, especially in the 20th century, but the flower was also used as a lesser-known symbol for homosexual love. Lesbians gifted lavender as a covert way of expressing their romantic interest in one another, and the flower became increasingly entwined with queer identity throughout the mid-1900s.

The ‘lavender scare’ was a time that parallelled the ‘red scare’ in 1940s and 50s America when those perceived to be a part of the community were fired from their jobs, often when working for the American government, due to their supposed ‘communist sympathies’ because of their sexuality.

The colour lavender was used to symbolise queer identity once again a month after the pivotal Stonewall Riots, in July 1969, as lavender sashes and armbands were handed out by the Gay Liberation Front in a ‘gay power’ march across New York City.

The Gay Liberation Front was the first recorded gay organisation to use ‘gay’ in its name, and its existence and work marked a turning point for the LGBTQ+ community across the globe. One of their first badges used a purple flower with the male/female symbols detailing its petals, whilst resting on a raised fist, a historic symbol of protest. The badge, which can currently be seen at St Fagans’ Wales is: Proud gallery.

A radical feminist group, ‘the Lavender Menace’, was an informal group that protested the exclusion of lesbians and sapphic women in feminist movements in the early 1970s. The term was first used by feminist writer and activist Betty Friedan, who described lesbians as a ‘lavender menace’ that would undermine the entire women’s liberation movement. The name was adopted by the group as a way of reclaiming the negative language used about them, and they are widely associated as being integral to the founding of lesbian feminism.

Carnations

Oscar Wilde, the Victorian author, famously popularised the green carnation in the late 19th century. The flower was dyed by watering it with water laced with arsenic. He pinned one to his left lapel, a style that keeps cropping up as we analyse the use of these flowers as a way to subtly signal to others that he was a rebellious individual, a man who loved other men, in a society that condemned and criminalised male homosexuality– Victorian London.

Eventually, after the publication of a book written anonymously, ‘The Green Carnation’, Wilde was arrested and jailed for gross indecency. Wilde outright denied writing the book, but his work popularising the carnation years prior was enough for authorities to pin the work on him.

Despite this, the carnation prevailed, and it is still a recognised symbol today, albeit a less popular one.

Roses

The rose is a well-known symbol of love, and of course this extends to queer love. In 1960s Japan the rose became an iconic symbol for gay men, even influencing the language they use to describe gay men today. Bara, meaning rose, is a commonly used term for the community.

Roses are also special to the transgender community, especially on Trans Day of Visibility (March 31st), when the phrase ‘give us our roses while we are still here’ is echoed. It means that we should celebrate the lives of trans people, of trans WOC, rather than simply mourning them when they are killed. It is about decentring grief in the trans community and celebrating life whilst amplifying transgender voices. The rose is an important symbol of this, showing appreciation and joy for transgender people.

In this painting, a self-portrait by gay artist Cedric Morris while he lived with his partner in Cornwall, Morris is depicted with a rose pinned to his lapel. Whether this is symbolic of his love or homosexuality is unclear, but it is an obvious example of the tie between the LGBTQ+ community and flowers throughout the ages. Morris was relatively open about his relationship with fellow artist Arthur Lett-Haines, despite homosexuality being illegal at the time.

Flowers are still an integral part of our community and a beautiful way to honour our history. A piece from the museum's archives I find particularly valuable is the flowers worn during the marriage of two gay men, Federico Podeschi and Darren Warren, on the day same-sex marriage was legalised in England and Wales. These flowers symbolise so much that the queer community has fought for: the right to be legally recognised. But they remind us that there is so much further to go, especially in these uncertain times and how recently it was that we gained some basic rights.

My workshop, run both this year and last for Pride, encourages you to connect with our history through the medium of printmaking. Last year we created a banner to be marched at Pride Cymru, and now I will invite participants to create a piece of art to take home or gift to another.

Elizabeth Bartlett @liz_did_stuff on Instagram

Amgueddfa Cymru Producers [ACPs] are a group of young people aged 16 – 25 living in or from Wales who collaborate with the Museum through participatory and paid opportunities.

This is a space to deepen knowledge and to ensure that cultural and heritage spaces are more representational of the young people and their many cultures that make up Wales today. We are here to make heritage relevant!

We explore art, heritage and identity, environmentalism, natural science, social history and archaeology through our collections and by co-producing events, workshops, exhibitions, digital media, publications, development groups and more! Our ACPs work closely with departments across the Museum to help us deepen representation within our collections and programming, that reflects all communities in Wales. This includes expanding our LGBTQ+ collection, decolonising our collections and gathering working-class history through oral histories. ACPs can also bring their own ideas or topics they wish to explore through our collections!

You can sign up to our mailing list here to keep up to date with news and new opportunities.

If you have any queries you can email us on bloedd.ac@museumwales.ac.uk. Follow us on Instagram to keep updated on all things Bloedd! 

To celebrate Pride Month this year, some of our amazing ACPs will be hosting Pride themed workshops across some of our museums this June. As part of that celebration, we asked them to reflect on the themes and inspiration behind their workshop and what Pride means to them. 

The Workshop: Breaking, Repairing, Becoming 

Pride Month is more than celebration — it’s also about restoration. About finding stillness. About reclaiming space — not only in the world around us but within ourselves. My workshop Broken Yet Beautiful lives in that in-between space. It’s where creative expression meets personal healing, where fragments are not failures, but materials for something new. 

This project began during my final year, born out of a personal journey exploring identity, repair, and resilience. It wasn’t just a project — it became a way of understanding the world and our place within it. Over time, it has grown into something deeply collective: a workshop where people are invited to break a ceramic object and rebuild it using fast-drying clay. There’s a strange beauty in that process — a catharsis, a stillness, a soft power. 

At the end of my internship, I wrote a detailed blog for Cynfas reflecting on how Broken Yet Beautiful grew out of my final project and personal journey. 

So, when I brought Broken Yet Beautiful to the National Waterfront Museum this Pride Month, I wasn’t introducing something new. I was holding space for others to experience what I had: the quiet liberation of breaking and rebuilding, of letting go, and of forming something new with care.

During the workshop, participants chose objects, gently broke them, and spent time thoughtfully reassembling each piece — no longer what it was, but still full of meaning. The soundscape of breaking ceramics echoed in the background, not as destruction, but as release.

Fragments of History: Artworks That Spoke to Me 

While reflecting on this work, I spent time looking through the LGBTQ+ collection at Amgueddfa Cymru. A few pieces in particular resonated with me - Cup, Theatre Container and Extended Teapot by Suttie,Angus (1946-1993). When I came across Ladies of Llangollen – Dillwyn and Cow Creamers by Paul Scott, I stopped. Just for a moment — I froze. It felt like I’d stumbled into a story that didn’t need to shout to be heard. 

This work — a wooden tray filled with ceramic fragments — reads like a memory map. A cabinet of echoes. Each shard of blue-and-white domestic ware holds something: a glimpse into time, place, love, rupture. It’s not just ceramic — it’s a landscape of emotion. A kind of quiet archive. And as both an artist and a curator working with themes of identity and repair, I felt an immediate kinship with what Scott was doing. 

We do not mend to hide the scar, but 

trace its curve and let it sing. The 

past may splinter — still, we hold 

each shard like it remembers spring. 

The reference to the Ladies of Llangollen — Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby — adds a tender depth. Two women who defied 18th-century expectations and lived together in a self-declared romantic friendship, they turned their home into a sanctuary for intellectuals, artists, and thinkers. Their story is often romanticised — but here, in Scott’s work, it is made material. Grounded. The fragments of everyday domestic life — plates, cups, cow creamers — become vessels of queer memory, intimacy, and resistance. 

What moved me most was the way the piece doesn’t try to “fix” anything. The broken pieces aren’t disguised or forced back into their original form. They’re framed. Held. Given new meaning. There’s a quiet dignity in that. A soft resilience that speaks more truthfully than restoration ever could. 

To me, Ladies of Llangollen mirrors what we try to do in Broken Yet Beautiful: not to erase cracks, but to honour them. Not to return something to what it was, but to allow it to become something else — something that tells the truth of what it’s been through. 

It’s in this act of holding — not hiding — that the work finds its power. 

Belonging in the Making 

Through my work with Amgueddfa Cymru, I’ve connected with Bloedd — a youth-led programme uplifting LGBTQ+ voices across Wales. If you're a young person, Bloedd is a space for you. To create, to speak, to belong. 

This Pride Month, I’m celebrating more than identity — I’m honouring the quiet strength it takes to rebuild, and the power of coming together. 

Workshops like this offer more than creativity. They offer space — to reflect, to exist, and to heal. Even in fragments, we are still whole. 

Amgueddfa Cymru Producers [ACPs] are a group of young people aged 16 – 25 living in or from Wales who collaborate with the Museum through participatory and paid opportunities.

This is a space to deepen knowledge and to ensure that cultural and heritage spaces are more representational of the young people and their many cultures that make up Wales today. We are here to make heritage relevant!

We explore art, heritage and identity, environmentalism, natural science, social history and archaeology through our collections and by co-producing events, workshops, exhibitions, digital media, publications, development groups and more! Our ACPs work closely with departments across the Museum to help us deepen representation within our collections and programming, that reflects all communities in Wales. This includes expanding our LGBTQ+ collection, decolonising our collections and gathering working-class history through oral histories. ACPs can also bring their own ideas or topics they wish to explore through our collections!

You can sign up to our mailing list here to keep up to date with news and new opportunities.

If you have any queries you can email us on bloedd.ac@museumwales.ac.uk. Follow us on Instagram to keep updated on all things Bloedd! 

Who are you? How and why did you join Demystifying Acquisitions? 

My name is Abraham Makanjuola, I am originally from London and I work as a Health Economist for Bangor University. During my masters, I was working with the Sub-Sahara Advisory Panel (SSAP) on a documentary about narratives about the African Continent from the perspective of people from the diaspora linked with the UK. Following the release of this, I was approached about being involved with filming behind the scenes content for Demystifying Acquisitions. I was initially not sure, because I didn’t know what I had of value to offer the project, but I was met with encouragement and that helped me make my decision. I think that was one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life to date. 

How did you find the overall experience of working for Demystifying Acquisitions? 

It was sensational, I would do it all over again exactly as it has played out. I genuinely have nothing negative to say and there aren’t any glaring issues that require addressing from my perspective. I think that is a testament to the people I was blessed enough to work with. I have enjoyed myself and learned so much over the past couple of years and I am grateful to all involved. 

What set of skills did you gain while working on the project? 

Specific to new museum knowledge, I learned about the conservation of artwork, how the bid and grant writing process works, and how to write labels for artworks in galleries. Wider softer skills I was able to develop were teamwork and collaboration, and project management. 

What was your favourite part of working on the project? 

My favourite part was being a part of the install day of the redisplay, I even got to put up one of the works which was cool. Prior to this day though, my favourite part was learning about label writing. Did you feel listened to? Were you able to influence or change things? What instance? Throughout the process we were given complete autonomy and were encouraged and supported with our group decisions. With this support we were able to respect museum practices but also shake things up and challenge how things have previously been done. We did have push back for certain decisions we made but there was always mutual understanding and respect.


 

1 Corinthians 12 introduces its readers to the lasting image of the fledging church as a physical body – each part with different but important roles to fulfil. This metaphor has endured for centuries, and is a challenging one for many Christians today, who struggle with things like hard denominational boundaries and tribal us/them attitudes. For Fr. Ruth, a queer priest in the Church in Wales (CiW), it has a similarly challenging but uplifting message. 

Ruth is a curate (trainee vicar) in the Islwyn Ministry Area in the Diocese of Monmouth, and she’s part of a team that looks after twelve different churches up and down the Gwent Valleys. She’s also bisexual, gender-non-conforming, and in a civil partnership with her spouse, Hannah. In addition to her ministry in the CiW, Ruth is one of four Pastoral Leaders of an ecumenical LGBTQ+ church in Cardiff called The Gathering. 

If that surprises you, that’s okay. But, despite what you may have been taught, queer people have always been a part of the life of the church. We have always been vicars, ministers, deacons, worship leaders, caretakers, congregants, youth group leaders. We are a part of the heritage and life of the church in a way that has, for too long, been overlooked and brushed aside.

The Anglican Church, in particular the Church of England, is undergoing a real reckoning at the moment over the issue of blessing same-sex marriages. The CiW has already had this conversation, and voted in 2021 to bless the marriages of same-sex couples. Whilst, for many, this does not go far enough, it is generally seen as a good first step, and it sets a precedent for other Anglican churches also having this discussion. It also puts those campaigning for marriage equality in a really good position for the Church in Wales to formally allow the sacramental celebration of marriage (hopefully) soon. The current position is bittersweet for many, though. As Fr. Ruth explained to me: “When the current legislation passed, that was a huge change for the Church in Wales. But I felt quite conflicted about it. In part, I am delighted that we can offer something to people for whom the church have been offering nothing. But, in part, it feels like a half-hearted step, where, what you're saying is ‘we're going to recognise that these relationships are good and holy and that God can bless them, but we're not willing to offer you the sacrament of marriage’. It feels theologically incomplete. And it's hurtful, as a queer person in a relationship, to know that the sacrament of marriage is withheld from us.”

It is still a huge deal, though, especially when you consider the length of Christian history that we were completely excluded from the public life of the church. We were still there, though, in closets and in the background, and I like to find queerness reflected in artwork throughout Christian history. It’s forever fascinating to me the ways in which artists, for hundreds of years, have been interpreting biblical stories in ways that we, as audience members and critics, can see the homoerotic. In this artwork, we can see ourselves reflected; here, in the shadow of gender transgression, there, in the hint towards homoeroticism. Indeed, for many artists throughout history, the only acceptable outlet for them to express their homoerotic desires was to displace them through artistic interpretations of ‘safe’ stories and figures – biblical scenes and characters. For example, artwork depicting the martyrdom of St. Sebastian is almost always homoerotic – after all, an attractive young man, mostly naked, is often depicted as being penetrated by arrows.

For Ruth, the ways in which she honours her place in the Church, and where she sees herself in the heritage of the church, is through the practise of the Eucharist. A useful image for her in thinking about the Eucharist is that of a human heart. “During the Eucharist, the church is like the chambers of the heart. It draws in that which needs nourishment. In the movement of the Eucharist, the nourishment is received, like blood going out to the lungs and coming back again, and then it's sent back out into the rest of its community.” So, when Jesus says, at the Last Supper, “Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19, NRSV), and we partake in this remembrance, we become a part of something bigger than us – an invisible string that stretches back centuries, connecting everyone across the world that’s ever remembered Jesus’ life in this way, like branches of a nervous system spanning time and space and holding us together. In this act of remembrance, “in becoming the body of Christ, all of the boundaries get blurry. So we become parts of a whole. That requires all of our differences.” It requires our differences in sexuality and gender identity, and how we interact with the world around us as embodied creatures. “As someone who the church historically would have said ‘we have no need of you’, I find it really, really heartening that those who still wish queer folks weren’t in ministry can't say ‘we have no need of you’. Because here we stand within the sacramental honours of the life of the church. You cannot say to me: I have no need of you. The challenging side is, I can't say to them I have no need of them either. We are brought together in that wholeness. And that wholeness is of God and so it's not up to us to say we have no need of one another.”

In a world full of divisive individualism, rituals like a Eucharist serve as an important reminder that we are a part of a much, much larger whole. The human body is an ecosystem of multitudinous grace, apathy, compassion and anger – never just one thing, always many interlinking feelings and experiences and beliefs. And, if a single human body is an ecosystem, how vast must the ecosystems of our societies be? Another word for Eucharist is Communion. This is the term that I grew up with in my faith tradition, and it holds both a special and fraught place in my heart because of it. The obvious reason behind it being called Communion is that it is through this ritual that we commune with God – we honour Jesus’ life and death, and are in communion with something greater than ourselves. But, through the connections and interconnections of this action, are we not also in communion with one another? Are we not then, in spite of all the things that separate us, one body? 

 ‘Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. […] If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many members yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” […] If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it.’ (1 Cor. 12:12-26, NRSV). 

When it came to writing this article, my thought space had been taken to the theme of journeys; the unknown ground between a beginning and an ending. My journey as a young producer for Bloedd’s latest project, an LGBTQIA+ oral histories exhibition, has been a nearly yearlong one. What began as conversation in a shared space containing mutual interests and passions, defined the nucleus of my work here. The beginnings of this time had been an unpacking of what we felt as a collective was important to represent for an upcoming exhibition. We knew from the jump that we wanted to represent voices that may often go unheard; those whose experience may not be recounted upon by the mainstream perception of what it means to live an LGBTQIA+ life. 

Moving away from the typical portrait of queerness being a thrown brick in protest, that while important, we are more than our fight for freedoms; our stories can be found in the everyday, in the places we visit, the jobs we keep, the people we love and share our lives with. The given name of this exhibition, Ours to Tell, came only after we had completed our collection of stories, the self-described journey we undertook over several months of visits and interviews, holding dialogue with well over fifty years of experience. But what is in a name? Ours to Tell is a reclamation. It’s our way of saying “here is a story, told by a firsthand account of the storyteller”. It’s our way of saying “these words are cut from a book hidden away in the attic of my mind. I’ve ventured into the attic, and I’m dusting it off for you.” It’s our way of saying “this is where I come from”. 

While the journey of this project has been underpinned by a great deal of planning and preparation, what you can’t prepare for is what you might uncover in someone else’s story. You commit to the routine of presenting a series of questions, from you to the storyteller, with only a table between you. It comes as a surprise the level of detail, which is excavated by the storyteller, they are like a hoarder being handed a stepladder, invited to dig up their stowed away possessions from the attic. Your questions are prompts: “when did you first see your identity reflected in someone else?”, “what does a safe space look like to you?”, the list goes on. The exciting part is that you don’t know what’s coming next, and you are there, alongside the storyteller, who guides you through a journey which may well bring up a familiarity or nostalgia for the listener. During these times when I’ve had the great pleasure to listen to these stories, I can confidently say that I have felt every kind of emotion in response. I laughed. I have cried. I have been moved. I have been taken on a journey.

Enabling the participants of this project to confidently speak about their experiences has proved an undeniable joy, though I cannot understate how this project has affected those coordinating its launch. Fellow young producer Joss Copeman, like me had been drawn to this exciting opportunity, Copeman’s “personal work is largely centred around queer narratives and themes of identity and the self.” The journey which unfolded from Ours to Tell has been greatly beneficial, as it pertains to young LGBTQIA+ creatives and makers, taking inspiration from unheard voices, now affected and transformed by echoes of their experience. This is a feeling I know will resonate with the audience, and I can only hope it will stir others in future, to share what might be put away, gathering dust in the attic. 

I’d like to conclude with a quote that shook me like a cat in a tree, “Art is not just for oneself, not just a marker of one’s own understanding. It is also a map for those who follow after us.”

Written by Ivy Kelly, Amgueddfa Cymru Producer (Bloedd).

Bloedd is the platform for youth engagement at Amgueddfa Cymru.