The Queer Creative Health zine which I made in collaboration with QUEERCIRCLE is now part of a new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection: The Coming of Age. The Wellcome Collection is a free museum and library exploring health and human experience.

Life paths are diverse and unpredictable, as writer and illustrator MJ Barker observes: “Many, if not most, people fall off the normative escalator at some point in their lives.” Rigid social norms damage everyone: those who force themselves to fit them, and those who are marginalised by them. QUEERCIRCLE’s Queer Creative Health zine series explores tender, queer potentials for relating with ourselves, others, and the world in more expansive ways. Referencing artist Kit Green – creator of the multi-genre project ‘The Home’, about residential elder care – this zine asks what the ongoing process of ageing might open up and close down, for all of us.

The Coming of Age exhibition – on till November 2026 – explores age and aging across time and space, bringing objects from the Wellcome Collection into dialogue with modern day art and creative research projects.

Frances Williams from QUEERCIRCLE, Kit Green who is one of the QUEERCIRCLE collaborators, and myself were fortunate to be given a tour of the exhibition by its collections curator, Ruth Horry, last week. I then spent a good couple of hours going round again slowly, allowing myself to feel what came up internally in response to the various objects and artworks.

Centring Bradford

I was thrilled to see my hometown of Bradford play such a pivotal role in the exhibition. Ian Beesley‘s City of Research banner hangs near the beginning, in the Living Longer section, highlighting numerous Bradford public health projects including Born in Bradford. This is followed, in the Acting Your Age? section, by photographs and interview quotes from some of the young people who are part of Carolyn Mendelsohn‘s Age of Wonder project, linked to the Born in Bradford research. Finally, in the section on Connection and Care, there is information about the Hamari Yaadain: When We Talk Will You Listen?, and The Right To A Grand Day Out initiatives. These support dementia care (including for people with English as a second language), aging, and community connectivity, following Bradford’s year as City of Culture, 2025.

Life’s Courses and Queer Creative Health

My own zine was included in the Life’s Courses section of the exhibition, which interrogates the ways in which people have tried to map life into stages, suggesting predictable journeys with successful outcomes. The section begins with 19th century prints depicting life as a set of steps you need to climb up during life (and then down, as you decline in your later years). That’s followed by a 1980s version of the board game The Game of Life, which I remember well from my youth! In this version of the game you are represented by a pink or blue peg in a car, driving around to find your opposite peg, followed by a number of child pegs. To win the game you need to climb the career and property ladders, be productive, and accumulate as much wealth – and as many prestige possessions – as possible.

Queer Creative Health Zine: Queer as Non-Normative

I was completely unaware of the popularity of those 19th century prints when I made the Queer Creative Health zine, which depicts the ways in which most – if not all – of us are ‘queered by life’: falling off the escalator of what makes a successful self when we’re unable and/or unwilling to follow any of these steps. The point is that these normative models – as depicted in the prints and The Game of Life – harm all of us: those who are marginalised by them, and those who keep attempting to fit the rigid stages of a ‘successful’ life, work, relationship, and family.

I found it deeply affirming to have this page of the zine welcomed by Wellcome, as I find myself moving further and further from what’s culturally celebrated as a normal/successful life, as well as supporting others who are stepping off that normative stage model in various ways.

Queer Creative Health Zine: Queer Aging

The second pages of the zine which the exhibition included draws on Kit Green‘s work to ask questions about how trans people challenge normative ideas of aging, and how we might imagine ourselves as queer elders. As Kit says: ‘aging is the greatest transitioning process’. It was great to see these themes taken up, later in the exhibition, by artist Flo Brooks (who explores the experience of a second trans puberty) and poet Harry Josephine Giles (whose zine, Lines, explores how the pressures of aging for women are intensified for a trans woman),

My zine is followed by some beautiful videos about diverse experiences of aging in an indigenous Canadian context: Aging Vitalities, co-created by Nadine Changfoot. In this section there is also the written manuscript of Jenny Joseph‘s famous poem which starts ‘When I am an old woman I shall wear purple’, and a fab collage drawing from Magic Me‘s project. In this project, young and old people critiqued the messages about age in standard birthday cards and created the own instead.

Finally, in the Life’s Courses section of the exhibition, there are examples of artist Makoto Toya‘s artworks, which he revisits and reworks across the decades of his life. This one resonated for me as I’ve just finished revising my book, Rewriting The Rules, for a third edition, mostly by adding new reflective sections to each chapter, and to the book as a whole.

I love the idea that we might continue to revisit and rework our creativity as we – and the world around us – changes. This challenges any sense that we should perform some kind of impossible timeless perfection through our work, and acknowledges the inevitable and vital role of mistakes and misteps, wrinkles and wrong-ings, struggles and setbacks. This was highlighted later in The Coming of Age exhibition through projects reflecting artists’ experiences of menopause, falls, and dementia, and through the wonderful Restaurant of Mistaken Orders, which employs people with dementia as floor staff. What could it be to embrace the inevitability of ‘getting it wrong’ this thoroughly?

Zines

Finally, I thought it was wonderful that Wellcome included two of the zines from their zine collection in The Coming of Age, following their Zines Forever exhibition – which centred disability zines – last year. Check out Wellcome’s zine collection if you want to read their collected zines, or find out more about zines and zining.

I’m just starting work on a third zine in the Queer Creative Health series, with QUEERCIRCLE. The first zine is the one that was included in the Wellcome exhibition. It explored what queerness, creativity, and health are, and how they can come together. The second zine focused on ‘researching ourselves‘ at the levels of embodiment (our inner experience), entanglement (our relationships), and embeddedness (our community/culture/ecosystem). The third zine will draw on the current QUEERCIRCLE season on countermapping to consider how we might go about ‘mapping ourselves’ at all these levels of experience.

One thing I hope to explore in this zine is mapping our lifecourses, drawing on some of the questions raised in The Coming of Age. Frances and I wondered about inviting readers to make their own (queer) version of The Game of Life!

Check it out

If you’re London-based, or travelling through London in the comings months, do check out The Coming of Age exhibition if you feel to. If you can’t make it in person, you can  see images of some of the exhibits on the Wellcome website, and access all the exhibition text here. You can read an interview about aging with exhibition curator Shamita Sharmacharja here. The State of Aging infographics, included in the exhibition, highlight how experiences of getting older in the UK are highly varied and reflect wider social inequality. You can find these at the Centre for Aging Better.

You might also like to check out the current season at QUEERCIRCLE: Desire Lines and Counter Mapping Queer Creative Health. If you can’t make it in person, you can read the excellent new QUEERCIRCLE publication Fragments of a Queer Radical Mapping Praxis, co-developed by researcher and theatre practitioner River Újhadbor.

The third Queer Creative Health zine should be available in Autumn 2026. It will aim to make the queer mapping practices highlighted in the QUEERCIRCLE report – and season – available to a wider audiences.