Queertographing County Durham

In 2024, artist Emory Southwick hosted three art workshops for LGBTQIA+ people to share their memories of County Durham. The workshops offered an inclusive, escapist space for the queer community to come together to share, create, and commemorate their important places in the area through collage, writing, and illustration. 

Pride of Place: Queer Spaces of County Durham was borne from the art, zines, comics, poetry, and prose created during these workshops to highlight Durham’s hidden queer spaces. As well as this, there is a space to reflect on your own queer space. The work collected in this book is both a love letter to the area, and to the wider community that makes County Durham so special, so gorgeous, and so quintessentially queer.

The book is a collection of creative work created by County Durham’s queer community. It celebrates the local area by highlighting the personal connections between its people and places in the form of art and poetry. 

Emory will be talking to Miles Nelson at People’s Bookshop on 21st February at 7pm. They’ll be talking about queerness, community, and what that all means in County Durham.