LOVED: Palimpsest

LOVED is a collaborative art project by visual artist Charlie Hunter and sound designer Mike Wyeld.

Combining large-scale drawings, printmaking, recorded interviews, sound installation, and performance, LOVED explores the lives, identities, and experiences of queer people through conversation, drawing, and listening.

Since its inception, the project has focused on the global Bear community, using individual stories as a way to examine wider questions of masculinity, sexuality, belonging, body image, desire, aging, joy, loss, and self-invention. Each exhibition is shaped by the people who participate in it, creating a living archive of voices and experiences gathered across different cities, countries, and generations.

As the project has developed, LOVED has increasingly become concerned with memory and inheritance. The stories we tell about ourselves are never created in isolation. They emerge from earlier histories, earlier struggles, earlier communities, and earlier acts of survival. Some stories remain visible. Others fade, are forgotten, or survive only as traces.

This idea forms the basis of LOVED: Palimpsest.

Borrowing its title from the historical palimpsest, a manuscript that has been written upon, erased, and written upon again, LOVED: Palimpsest explores queer culture as a layered accumulation of voices across time. New generations do not simply replace those that came before them. Rather, they write themselves over existing histories while carrying fragments of those histories forward.

Through drawing, sound, text, performance, and participation, LOVED asks how queer lives are remembered, how communities transmit knowledge, and what remains when one story is partially obscured by another.

At its heart, LOVED remains an act of attention: a space where voices, bodies, memories, and histories can be heard together, not as a single narrative, but as many overlapping layers of queer experience.