Peeking through the layers

Ben Walters on His New Collage Work

Ben Walters’ creative practice is grounded in the everyday gestures of queer world-building — the small, collaborative acts that create space, meaning, and possibility. His Badge Cafe project is one such space: a participatory pop-up where people create badges from reused magazines and books. But from this activity comes an unexpected byproduct — pages left behind, punctured with circular holes, exposing layered, often startling juxtapositions beneath. These “accidental collages,” as Ben calls them, have become the foundation of a new visual body of work that is by turns camp, erotic, absurd, and profoundly moving.

I first encountered these pieces at Ben’s Archiving Desires show at Rich Mix in 2024 and was immediately struck by their quiet, magnetic tension. What’s been removed? What’s been revealed? And who made those choices? The instant rush of questions that arise when looking at Ben’s collages — the desire to know more, and the frustration of not being able to know the answers — makes them so engaging. I also found Ben’s participatory-driven creative practice very reminiscent of Yoko Ono’s book of conceptual instructions, Grapefruit, which includes several pieces involving the act of creating or looking through holes. His collages tell incredibly rich stories, and in this conversation, Ben and I discuss the symbolism of holes, queer lineage, and what can emerge when intention meets accident.

Davy Pittoors: Let’s begin with the structure of the work itself. Your collages are made from vintage books or magazines where circular holes have been cut — exposing what lies beneath. But for those unfamiliar with the context, can you walk us through the making process?

Ben Walters: Sure. Basically, these collages are a byproduct of a different creative event, which is my main project — Badge Cafe — a participatory pop-up where people come together to relax, create, and connect by making their own badges out of reused books and magazines. So there’s a big stack of materials — everything from Beryl Cook to vintage porn mags to The Very Hungry Caterpillar — and people flick through and use card viewfinders with a badge-sized hole to isolate images they like.

They then cut them out with special circle cutters and give them to me to turn into a badge, as standalone images or as the basis of a collage. And what you’re left with is the page they took it from — now with a hole in it. Multiply that across a whole event — and I do maybe ten or twelve a month — and you end up with a lot of holes. That’s where the collages come from. Sometimes I’ll spot something interesting during a session, or I’ll go back later and see something that strikes me.

DP: We’ve talked before about how you describe them as “accidental” collages.

BW: Yeah — I call them accidental because nobody set out to make that collage. Someone might be making a badge, but they’re not thinking about what gets revealed underneath. That’s the accident. But they’re also not entirely accidental, because they emerge through a chain of intentional decisions — the books I bring, the images people choose to cut, the way the original pages were designed, and then my own decision about whether a particular juxtaposition seems interesting. So sometimes I call them emergent collages too.

DP: And there’s something fascinating about the fact that you only choose the start and end point of each collage and never alter them. That level of intentionality feels really powerful.

BW: Right. They’re always as found. I don’t change the juxtapositions. I never add cuts. I never remove pages or manipulate the layout. That’s really important to me. These are documents of what happened — the choices that were made, even if those choices weren’t about creating a collage. That’s one of the things I value most about them — that they’re records of decisions made during a live, social moment. What you’re looking at with the collages is a kind of physical trace of someone’s desire — their choice to take something away and what that action accidentally reveals.

DP: There’s a strong reportage and archival sensibility in your practice. Do you see your previous professional background feeding into this work?

BW: Yeah, totally. I’ve had quite a zig-zaggy path — journalism, queer nightlife, performance, academic research, campaigning for queer spaces — and all of that feeds into this work. It’s there in the materials I use, but also in how the Badge Cafe events are shaped. I learned a lot from working with the queer performance collective Duckie and their community-led projects — especially the idea that events can be collaborative spaces where you generate new things together, using fun as a kind of social technology.

There’s also this connection to queer history — treating the archive not as something frozen in time, but as a living resource. Something to cut up, reuse, make relevant now, for the sake of the future. So I see the collages as extensions of that space — documents of what happens when people gather, share, and create together.

DP: Your journalistic lens really comes through here too, especially in how each collage feels like a captured moment — someone’s story.

BW: Yeah, for sure. I think people’s decisions are inherently interesting. In journalism, you’re also trained to pay attention to what people are doing and why. And in this case, the collage captures that. Sometimes it’s just one person — like someone who cuts Lily Savage’s face out of a page because they want it on a badge, and you’re left with this glamorous headless figure — and then through the hole you see an overflowing ashtray on the next page. That kind of juxtaposition just appears.

Other times, it’s multiple people who’ve made successive cuts — and you get this layering effect. You might see a tulip on one page, then through that, a pink flower, and beneath that, a violet one. You get this depth that can go five, six, even seven layers down. It’s almost literary — like deciding where the story ends. If you stop here, it’s a comedy. If you stop there, it’s a tragedy.

DP: Yes, that’s a great way of putting it. The narratives in the collages can be so diverse — beautiful, strange, or sometimes quite erotic, and very queer too. Could you talk a bit more about that?

BW: Definitely. Holes are suggestive, especially in queer contexts. They’re about absence and presence at the same time. There’s something missing, but that absence also reveals something else. There’s a peekaboo effect. Sometimes it’s camp — like, “look what’s behind this hole!” Sometimes it’s voyeuristic. Sometimes it’s funny. And sometimes it’s about loss or concealment, or erasure or persistence — things taken out of circulation, out of view, out of history — or, conversely, things that refuse to remain invisible.

That’s one reason I love working with vintage porn and erotic magazines. There’s something about those images — they’re charged, sometimes surreal, and when they’re layered unexpectedly, they make you question what kinds of bodily or aesthetic arrangements are “normal” or “proper.” Which is a very queer question, really.

DP: That connects to the archival element as well — you’re often drawing from source material that is historically queer, politically charged, or culturally overlooked.

BW: Exactly. One of the collages we’ve selected together comes from a book I got at Archivo Arkhé in Madrid, a queer archive. It was water-damaged, and a duplicate, so they let me have it. And that damage becomes part of the story — it’s not pristine, it’s been through something, it’s been marked as disposable. And the image in question looks like an image of a boy, but where you expect his face to be, there’s another layer showing an older person with a more complex gender presentation.

It feels like a portrait — but not necessarily of one person. It’s maybe an imagined identity, or someone seen at multiple stages of life. That kind of queer time — a nonlinear sense of being folded in with others and oneself — that’s very powerful to me. It’s also something of a tribute to the editor of that particular book, Sébastien Lifshitz, an artist and filmmaker who’s very invested in queer lineage and desire.

DP: Totally. And now, these collages might enter new contexts — queer homes or public spaces. They’ll become part of new conversations and continue travelling through time.

BW: Yes, I love that. And I think your role in working with the framer and photographing them adds another layer. These are already collaborative works — between the original image-makers, magazine editors and designers, the badge-makers, me, the framer, and now you. And whoever ends up owning them brings their own story too. I like to imagine one of them ending up in a flea market in 20 years. Someone picks it up, has no idea what it is, but feels drawn to it. That’s part of the mystery — another hole to fall into.

DP: Haha yes, thank you! It was such a joy to select the collages with you from your archive and then work with The Framing Room to create frames that recontextualised the works — just enough so they retain their tactile quality, feel preserved, and are ready to take on their next chapter. Final question: what do you hope viewers take away from these works?

BW: Maybe a sense that the missing and the disposable might have value too. Or that creative expression is always a collaboration across individuality, across generations. Or that meaning is strange. They’re puzzles, in a way. There’s a bit of a challenge — a rupture of sense-making — or, on the other hand, a demand to make a connection. Like one taken from Gay Times in 1989, this time of queerphobic state brutality — it’s just a juxtaposition of partying and death. Two things happening simultaneously, as they often do. Sometimes, it’s enough to just witness that. Other times, I hope people lean in — ask, “What happened here?”

About Ben

Ben Walters is the founder of Badge Cafe, a travelling creative project using badge-making as a playful tool for community connection, activism, and hope. Rooted in his PhD research on queer fun and DIY "hope machines," Badge Cafe has appeared at festivals, museums, archives, universities, and cultural events across the UK and internationally, supported by Arts Council England.

​Alongside Badge Cafe, Ben’s visual art practice explores collage as a form of queer world-building — layering found materials to create alternative narratives and spaces of possibility.

Previously, Ben spent years collaborating with queer performance collective Duckie on community projects and was cabaret editor at Time Out London. He has also written for The Guardian, Observer, Sight & Sound, and BBC Radio, and was part of the campaign to make the Royal Vauxhall Tavern the UK’s first listed LGBTQ+ venue. Ben holds degrees from Cambridge, Columbia, Birkbeck, and Queen Mary University of London.

Ben's work has been shown as part of the exhibitions Archiving Desires (Rich Mix, London, 2024), Of Queerness… (Lot'sa, Chicago, 2024), Out from the Centre (Mimosa House, London, 2025) and The Well Hung Art Exhibition (Atlantis Bookshop, London, 2025).

Shop Ben's work HERE.