Hard Times Require Furious Dancing by Ian Thomas

About

Explore a striking series of large-scale textile works inspired by dancefloors, nightlife and the communities that gather around them.

Combining text, fabric and visual storytelling, Ian Thomas reflects on Oxford Street's enduring role as a place of expression, connection and belonging. Rich with colour, texture and cultural references, these works celebrate the ways people come together to create visibility, solidarity and joy.

Artist statement:

Taking its name from Alice Walker’s 2010 book of poetry, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing is an exploration of queer cultural memory through textiles, text and the experience of collective celebration. This body of work considers the dancefloor as a site of resistance, where bodies gather, identities are rehearsed and communities are formed against the pressures of exclusion, violence and erasure.

Drawing on disco and New Romanticism in the 1970s and 80s, the works trace how queer-led subcultures transformed nightlife into a shared space for resistance, pleasure and belonging. In disco, ecstatic movement became survival. Pleasure itself operated as defiance. Later, the New Romantics disrupted fixed ideas of gender and masculinity through theatricality, adornment and self-invention, offering new possibilities for queer visibility within Thatcher-era Britain.

Using stitching, layering and embellishments, these textile processes mirror the intimate labour of building community through shared rituals. Slogans and lyrical references are…