I’m honoured to announce a new book about my work and its place in both art history and queer arts practices, written by the art historian, author and curator Stephen Baycroft. 200 copies of the 1st edition have been printed and the book will be available soon.
A special signed slipcase edition will be available when purchasing an edition of the 12 inch Adlocutio (Sean Ford), 2025 produced to coincide with the release of this book. Available to purchase here.
From the black cover:
“Stuart Sandford’s artworks are explored in this book in relation to the shift of contemporary artistic discussions away from the use of the noun ‘queer’, toward the use of the verb ‘queering’ to explore how heteronormative hab- its, prejudices and traditions may be subverted (and thus overcome) using non-heteronormative thinking and visual artmaking. The queer(ing) use of subversions of heteronormative thinking and visual artmaking to pursue new paradisiacal ways of being, allow the production of non-heteronormative photographic, cinematographic, painterly, sculptural and photograph-based sculptural artworks by Sandford and other queer(ing) artists, to be explored in terms of breaking the ‘mind-forg’d conceptual manacles’ of the thinking of these artists and the spectators of their artworks; the use of rites of passage to have inner (mental) apocalyptic experiences of ‘self’-sacrifice and ‘self’-re- newal; uncanny experiences of cultural hybridisation and haunto(-eco-)logical awareness; the devaluation of a ‘root identity’ in favour of either a ‘personal relation identity’ or an ‘impersonal relational ethic’; and the undercommoner replacement of a heteronormative ‘old commons’ with a non-heteronormative ‘new commons’.
The queer(ing) relationships between lifeless nude sculptures, living nudes and living nude sculptures, are discussed in this book in terms of artistic revalu- ations of the Nietzschean concepts of eternal recurrence and the coming of the Janusian Superman; recurring circular temporal experiences of uncannily interweaving the ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’; the oracular hearing of Dionysiac ‘voices’ and Apolline ‘voices’; ‘shamanic’ magical and ecstatic experiences; and the masculine arts of ‘love-bombing’ and ‘love-bonding’. Queer(ing) experienc- es allow artists and the spectators of their artworks to undergo the ‘self’-sacri- ficial and ‘self’-renewing revaluations of their own perceptual and conceptual norms, needed to adapt to (and thus survive) the challenges posed by the con- tinuously changing flux of beings and events in the universe.”
Hardcover, 362 pages, 1st edition of 200 copies
Desire, Intimacy, Beauty and the Queering Spiral of Temporality
© text: Stuart Sandford, 2025
Queering the Circle into a Spiral: Eternity, Temporality and the Art of Stuart Sandford
© text: Stephen Baycroft, 2025
Published by Stephen Baycroft, 2025 www.BaycroftPublishing.co.uk
ISBN: 978-0-9955276-4-5
Cover design © Stuart Sandford, 2025
Images © Stuart Sandford, 2025
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or trans- mitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including pho- tocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system without per- mission from the publisher.
Book design and typesetting by Stuart Sandford
Cover illustration: Adlocutio (Sean Ford), (detail)
