Since founding The Pansy Project in 2005, artist Paul Harfleet has been planting pansies at sites of homophobic and transphobic abuse. Each flower is documented, titled after the words of the abuse, and added to this website. This quiet yet powerful act gently confronts hate crime and brings visibility to LGBTQ+ experiences that often go unreported. His photographs have been exhibited internationally in various contexts. To date, Harfleet has planted more than 300 individual pansies around the world, from London to New York and beyond continue reading…
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Queery Host, Samantha Jane, speaks with creater of The Pansy Project, Paul Harfleet. Since founding The Pansy Project in 2005, artist Paul Harfleet has been planting pansies at sites of homophobic and transphobic abuse. Each flower is documented, titled after the words of the abuse, and added to the Project’s website. This quiet yet powerful act gently confronts hate crime and brings visibility to LGBTQ+ experiences that often go unreported. His photographs have been exhibited internationally in various contexts. To date, Harfleet has planted more than 300 individual pansies around the world, from London to New York and beyond. Follow this link to listen to the whole interview.
Earlier this year Paul Harfleet painted this pansy for Queer Painting: Intervals, a collaborative exhibition presented by Amici Studio in partnership with curators Katie Tomlinson and Chester Tenneson, occupying the ground floor gallery at 12 Claremont, Hastings. Developed through an ongoing curatorial research project by Katie Tomlinson and Chester Tenneson, Queer Painting investigates how and why contemporary artists are using painting to represent, celebrate and reimagine gender, bringing renewed vitality and urgency to a field historically rooted in cis-heteronormative legacies. Queer Painting: Intervals explores the gaps and fractures in which queer lives, bodies and narratives have been overlooked throughout this history. Bringing together an intergenerational group of artists, the exhibition examines how these intervals can be reoccupied, reworked and resituated through painting and expanded painting practice. The mural, entitled “Fucking Faggot” is a symbolic act, representing The Pansy Project and has been left in place and can be viewed through the window at 12 Claremont, Hastings.
LOOK Climate Lab 2026 was a biennial programme exploring how photography can be a relevant and powerful medium for talking about climate change on show at Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool. The show included a selection of 60 photographs from the last twenty years of The Pansy Project, alongside a large print of The Pansy Project Garden that featured at the RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show in 2010, designed by Paul Harfleet and his brother Tom Harfleet. Pansies; A History of Violence, is an essay written by Paul Harfleet that accompanied the installation, available for download here. – Photo credit: Rob Battersby
