WORDS Bella Bonner-Evans
At first glance, London-based artist Leo Costelloe’s work seems very of the moment; populated by ornate bows, dolls and silver necklaces, it is easily associated with the ever-growing ‘coquette’ TikTok trend. Yet, over coffee in a Dalston café, the artist assures me that they have been making these pieces since their time as a student at Central Saint Martins, informed by a desire to understand their own gender and identity.
Having been raised in Australia, and spent their formative teenage years in what they describe as “deep, deep, deep suburbia”, Costelloe moved to London at the tender age of 19 and dove head first into East London’s queer scene. In the daytime, they worked with fashion’s favourite florist Simone Gooch at Fjura, while spending their nights experimenting with drag and performing as a go-go dancer. The notions that underpin their current art practice, for which they have now developed a cult online following that includes the likes of Lana Del Rey, arose during these foundational years. Between sweaty moments gyrating under a strobe light, and tiring days designing bespoke floral arrangements, they developed a unique aesthetic sensibility, a passion for timeless glamour and an unrivalled understanding of space and form that underpin their work to date.
Ahead of their solo exhibition ‘Special Day’ with Neven Gallery in East London – and following a screening of their film ‘Beautiful Bride in the City’ at Kupher and their inclusion in STUDIO WEST’s trio exhibition ‘The Blush Upon Her Cheek’ – we caught up with Costelloe to learn more about their practice.
Bella Bonner-Evans: I want to talk about tenderness. How do you understand tenderness, and how do you think it plays into your work?
Leo Costelloe: Tenderness is born from tactile intimacy, it’s something I exercise physically in my approach to making. I use materials I understand and am familiar with, and when I work with other people, I usually know them well and am very comfortable with them.
I also think tenderness gets misconstrued, or subsumed into femininity, in a potentially problematic way. It’s sad that we can’t understand these sorts of feelings without having these associations, which relates to the difficulties I have with contextualising my work – it so often always turns back to conversations about gender. These are obviously interesting conversations to be had, but not the only conversations there.
BBE: On that, to what extent do you identify with the correlation between femininity and your work?
LC: Even though it is naturally something that happens, I do reject it to an extent. I don’t want to tell people how to experience my work, but initially, it came more from an exploration of myself.
My image-based work, such as the film ‘Beautiful Bride in the City’, is still very personal and introspective, but my sculpture-based practice has become more playful and less self-aware over the years. I don’t necessarily have the same personal relationship to my sculptural practice as I did, and its meaning has changed a little because of the way it has travelled contextually, especially online. I’m trying to get this back through making new work; my show with Helen Neven is coming up, and the work I am doing feels the same to me, but I think it might surprise other people.
BBE: Tell me more about your show with Helen, what are you planning?
LC: It’s bridal. I wanted to engage with this obsession with union, and also with the silence and stoicism of this type of ceremony. The only time that there’s this tension and then sudden release in life is when someone is born, gets married, or dies. It links back to the other things that I explore in the work, like tenderness and femininity, but I am looking at them through a new lens. Some of the work is quite provocative – I want it to feel less decorative and more complex.
Recently, a lot of my work has been made in one place and consumed in another, especially in the fashion sphere. I am grateful for this, as it shows the work communicates with a lot of people in different ways, but I want to take it back to where I was making it from in the first place.
I think tenderness gets misconstrued, or subsumed into femininity, in a potentially problematic way. It’s sad that we can’t understand these sorts of feelings without having these associations, which relates to the difficulties I have with contextualising my work – it so often always turns back to conversations about gender.
Leo Costelloe
BBE: Speaking of re-contextualization, how do you feel about the relationship between your work and a very particular zeitgeist on Instagram and TikTok at the moment – the ‘coquette’ trend?
LC: I’m really grateful because I think it allows the work to be widely accessed. I have been making this work for a long time but my relationship with it has changed because of how the zeitgeist has exploded. I can see the way that the themes I was exploring have been re-contextualized.
There is also a lot of correlation between this trend and my ideas; at the very beginning, when I started making this work, I was watching a lot of Peter Weir films, reading Lolita and taking performative and feminised selfies of myself as a teenager.
BBE: I was going to say, I can see your work in the context of Lolita, Sofia Coppola’s films and Lana Del Rey’s music, for example. What else do you identify with, or see as inspiration?
LC: At the moment, I am reading a lot of Banana Yoshimoto, Chris Kraus, and Cookie Mueller. As a teenager, I loved Candy Darling and Marilyn Monroe. I grew up in a really rural part of Western Australia till I was 13, then I lived outside of Canberra. My dad was a ranger and a horticulturalist so we essentially lived in a forest. When I moved to London at 19, I was going out a lot and I made friends who did drag and worked in clubs. So, I started doing it, and became a go-go dancer at XOYO. It was fun and it paid me good money for a time.
BBE: What do you think you got from that for your practice, if anything?
LC: It was an external exploration of my identity and gender, and how I positioned myself sexually and visually in a queer environment. It was also formative in my early material knowledge, because there’s a lot of makeup, hair and costuming. I was never that good at it, but I did learn a lot.
I also learned from the people around me; what I really like to maintain is a thread of glamour through my work, and I think that’s where it came from. Glamour is really not about anything other than self-belief, and you have to have a lot of self-belief to be doing that sort of stuff – or be on a lot of drugs.
Glamour is really important in my work – It’s a very complex idea, and an interesting thing to adopt in a persona or in an artwork. It has a complicated power. It’s almost problematic, in the sense that it often comes with an air of tragedy, or maybe disaster. It’s always on the edge of something wrong.
I’ve worked on the fringes of luxury for so long, especially with the floristry, and it made me realise glamour isn’t about wealth. I haven’t necessarily had a very luxurious or typically glamorous life, but I think my knowledge of materiality and culture has been fed by those things.
BBE: I wanted to ask how the floristry comes in because I think there’s an aesthetic sensibility that runs through everything you do.
LC: Floristry is deceptively hard and physically draining, but it gave me a very astute knowledge of space which is integral to making good sculpture. You can make the most interesting thing in a studio and then put it somewhere else and it fails. My work with floristry was very spatially considered, we thought a lot about how things would speak to each other in a particular environment and I took this into my work.
BBE: I also wanted to ask you about queerness. How do you understand yourself in relation to queerness, and how do you think it has or hasn’t come into the work?
LC: I’ve always had an intense relationship to my own sexuality and physicality, and the way that’s been positioned in a wider queer sphere. Before there was a conversation around more fluid gender identities, I felt limited by how I could express myself. But then there was also a lot of freedom in that limitation, because it meant that there was less interrogation into personal identity. It’s really good to be asked these questions, but it’s also freeing to navigate a queer sphere without talking about it. I never came out as a teenager – I have fairly liberal parents so at some point I just got a boyfriend.
It’s also something that’s always evolving, isn’t it? I’ve had different experiences, especially throughout my 20s, where my relationship to my body and sexuality has shifted. This isn’t something I explore every day through the way I dress, or through the way that I communicate with other people, but I still have moments where I dress up and pursue a more solid exploration of my identity. I also externalise this through my work; it can be exhausting making art around identity, but it’s good that it opens up these conversations. That’s the beauty of making – you don’t necessarily owe everyone an insight.
I’m just a queer 30-year-old person navigating this stuff in the same way that I was as a teenager. This is why I have issues with my work being pigeonholed as queer art – it puts an onus on me for that to be the main exploration. Sometimes the work isn’t speaking on things in such a complex way – sometimes, it’s not even speaking for me; I could dig out stuff that I made when I was 16 and someone might attribute a meaning, but in reality, I was just a kid on the internet.
BBE: I feel like your work has such a relationship with the internet – it’s seen there, it fits there, it’s part of a kind of ecosystem, and then there’s your personal relationship with the internet. Were you a Tumblr kid?
LC: When I was young, I had very isolated experiences of my queerness and of my own identity – I grew up in deep, deep, deep suburbia with only one queer friend and before that, I lived in rural Australia. My exploration of these things really took place on the internet up until I moved to London. It has always been my meal ticket out of reality. Obviously, the work is not internet art, but the internet is definitely one of the biggest influences.
I TikTok to oblivion, it’s research for me. Youth culture is really important to my work, this type of self-exploration that you inhabit from your teens into your twenties. As I exit my twenties, I’m getting a different perspective on that period of my life. I grew up at the beginning of blogging, in the Tavi Gevinson era when the idea of maintaining and reviewing a blog of very personal thoughts was commonplace. I would write and post pictures of myself on my tumblr. At the time, it was also totally socially acceptable to be really vulnerable. Social media is much more guarded now in comparison. I work similarly now to how I did on Tumblr, but it’s just a much more considered approach to the same thing.
It’s the same with Instagram – I have gone through some very embarrassing phases on Instagram. My archive is filled with bath selfies and crying photos, and this disturbing writing that I, at one stage in my early 20s, thought was totally acceptable to post. I mean it still is acceptable but my filter has grown. My relationship with the internet has followed the trajectory that the internet has taken – it has become more and more curated as it’s developed.
Leo Costelloe’s solo show ‘Special Day’ with Neven opens on the 5th of April 2024.
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