THE GALLERY - QUEERLY

Searching for light in the dark

For Geelong artist Queerly, the creative process begins in the hours when most of us have already surrendered to sleep. Midnight bus stops, the hum of a fluorescent ceiling light, the rhythmic thrum of tyres on a wet road, these are the spaces he returns to again and again. They aren’t simply aesthetic choices; they are the landscapes of his inner life. For years, insomnia and social withdrawal shaped the way Queerly experienced the world. Over time, those night walks, drives, and aimless wanderings became his visual language, a way of processing the emotions inside him by seeking out the scattered, persistent lights that exist in a vast darkness.

Today, those countless moments, often captured as reference images in the five-year backlog stored on his phone, have become the backbone of his artistic practice. His paintings glow with neon reflections, fractured shadows, quiet interiors, and ghostlike streets where human presence is felt but rarely seen. They exist in that soft, liminal territory between solitude and loneliness; between longing and acceptance; between what is illuminated and what is deliberately left obscure.

“I take my heavy thoughts into the streets,” he says, “and wander until I find a reflection or a composition that reminds me there is persistent light in a vast darkness.” For Queerly, darkness is not absence, it’s a stage for illumination.

The North

To understand Queerly’s work, you must understand North Geelong. He lived in the area for twenty years, a span long enough for its blend of industrial sprawl, residential pockets, and commercial oddities to fuse with his sense of self. It is a place of contradictions, somewhere between lively and desolate, familiar and estranged, and it quietly shaped his development as an artist.

“It’s such a weird area,” he says affectionately. “Somewhere between residential, industrial and commercial, and I adore those streets once they empty at night.”

Anyone who has walked through North Geelong after dark will recognise the atmosphere that defines so many of Queerly’s paintings: the dim glow of distant streetlights on concrete, the scattered colours of passing cars caught on corrugated metal, the sudden loneliness of a lit exit sign in an almost empty room.

“I was always able to find something that captured how I was feeling,” he explains. "Whether I was stuck in my room with my thoughts or wandering somewhere between The Sphinx and Melbourne Road Maccas,"

It was only in the past nine months that Queerly finally allowed himself to feel part of Geelong’s creative community. A close friend’s involvement with Geelong Rainbow and Socialist Alliance inspired him to reach outward. Through them, he found people whose passion and vulnerability made connection feel less like a risk and more like a return.

“Becoming personally familiar with the community gives this sense of never having to walk alone,” he says. And that sentiment runs through his artwork too, even in pieces that depict solitude, there is a reminder that even the most isolated moments hold the possibility of connection.

A practice built on liminal light

Queerly’s paintings often depict real places, but they exist in a heightened emotional register. His colours, electric blues, greens, soft violets, glowing reds, they are less concerned with realism and more with resonance. The darkness isn’t black, it’s textured, shifting, alive. The light isn’t decorative, it’s structural, it's a revelation. Each artwork becomes its own emotional microclimate. The viewer is not simply looking at a place, they are looking at how Queerly felt inside it.

Queerly’s featured paintings reveal a world built from fractured light and emotional residue, each piece tracing the quiet tension between isolation, memory, and the small illuminations that guide him through darkness. EXIT II – Dive and Reckless Recapture share a haunting green luminescence: an exit sign in one, the glow on his own hands in the other, suggesting both a longing to escape and a desire to understand the spaces he inhabits. Greater Gemini captures the drifting introspection of night drives, the blurred city lights reflected through a car mirror, maybe a metaphor for duality and distance. Meanwhile, Square Eyes Lover turns inward to the soft ache of bedrooms lit only by TV screens, grounding his practice in intimate, familiar solitude.

More abstract and dreamlike, Old Moon XVIII amplifies the emotional atmosphere that defines his work. Its floating orb, fractured reflections, the neon-streaked darkness, it evokes a city remembered from afar, shimmering with longing. Across all five works, Queerly uses colour not as decoration but as emotional architecture, they can be shifting identities, maybe landscapes that continue to follow him even after he leaves them behind.

Grief, gratitude, and what comes next

This year brought a seismic shift. Queerly was suddenly unable to remain in North Geelong. The forced displacement reshaped his emotional landscape and infused his recent work with new urgency. Instead of drawing inspiration directly from the streets he wandered, he now paints from grief, gratitude, and the aching desire to retrace his steps.

His five-year backlog has become a lifeline, a way to return to the places that raised him as an artist. “I have this urge to relive my experiences,” he says. “Escape back into those locations and reframe my adoration with yearning.”

It is no coincidence that one of his traditions with his friends, drawing Tarot at New Year, offered him The Tower this year. It is the card of upheaval and rebirth, of painful dismantling and necessary transformation. “I’ve had no choice but to turn that pain into inspiration.” he says.

Despite everything, Queerly is moving forward. He has upcoming work in Liminal Gallery’s "9x5 – Impressions of Now", and in Figgis Gallery’s "Geelong Here & Now". He is also developing a small series of exit sign paintings, a thematic continuation of his exploration of light, guidance, and the desire for escape. Many of these exit signs come from locations around Geelong and they are titled after the places he used to wander. Maybe they are his way of returning.

The light that guides us

Queerly’s art is not about night, it is about what survives and thrives inside it. His paintings are atmospheric, intimate, built from quiet emotions, filled with longing and displacement, tones of numbness and nostalgia, hope and grief. They ask the viewer to look closely at the places we usually ignore, empty rooms, reflections, dark corners, bedrooms lit by the glow of some device, and they remind us that light does not need to be bright to be meaningful.

Queerly follows that light. And through his work, he invites us to follow it too. Head over to his instagram to explore more.

Fancy sending us some of your artwork? Just email us at geelongcereal@gmail.com. 

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