Lou Barcott uses wallpapers, zines, and hand-painted furniture to think about domesticity, queer and trans life, and history. Approaching wallpapers from an archival perspective, they look at the drawings left in the margins of LGBT history; signatures, doodles, one-off illustrations, and turn this marginalia into patterns based on traditional wallpaper designs. By recreating their notes, these works become a collaboration between Barcott and the hands of the past. They're interested in making physical how learning about our elders’ and communities’ ways of living in the world as Queer people can shape our own identities. These pattern works provide the base of Barcott's installations, which are rooms designed as self-sustained worlds filled with color and clutter. These rooms move patterns onto furniture and ephemera, creating kaleidoscopic spaces that reward the viewer for looking closely. Inspired by the Pattern and Decoration movement, as well as research-based artists like Chris Vargas, Lou's work is playful, referential, campy, and above all tenderhearted.
