“If no one writes it down or draws it, it just becomes ‘some woman lived here.’”
That sentence has been rattling around my head for the last week, which is inconvenient because I need the space for remembering where I put my car keys. But it is true,bif nobody records it, if nobody labels it, if nobody keeps it safe in a shoebox or a gallery or even a badly lit pub toilet, then it just dissolves. Some woman lived here. She probably owned a sensible cardigan. The end.
This is the invisibility problem, and it is one that lesbian art keeps running into like a pigeon into a conservatory door.
We vanish easily. Our relationships are not always documented, our love letters get described as “close friendships,” our shared houses become “companions living together,” and our artwork is filed under “female domestic interior,” as if that explains why there are two toothbrushes. If it is not labelled lesbian art, it becomes neutral, and neutral is often just a synonym for erased.
Which is why posterity matters, and which is why I ended up drawing a toilet.
The big lesbian toilet and the accidental archive
I started creating a piece called The Big Lesbian Toilet because I thought it would be funny. That was genuinely the full depth of my artistic intention. I wanted to draw a toilet cubicle in a lesbian bar, trousers hypothetically around your ankles, facing a door that has seen things, and cover it in sapphic graffiti because toilets are famously democratic noticeboards for feelings, declarations, and questionable spelling.
I thought it would be a light bit of lesbian art, a nod to the queer and the initiated. Something that made people snort slightly through their nose.
Then I realised I do not possess the imagination required to invent that much graffiti. I could manage perhaps three fake couples and a half-hearted heart shape, so I began writing down the names of real lesbian couples I knew as a small tribute.
Turns out I do not know that many lesbian couples either, which felt like a personal failing and a statistical improbability.
So I did what any modern lesbian artist would do. I went to social media and essentially said, does anyone want their names written in a toilet.
Over 1400 names later, I am still trying to keep up.
The gay community delivered with the enthusiasm of a group chat that has just discovered a new scandal. Names poured in, couples from all over, some together for decades, some together for three weeks, some newly engaged, some married, some defiantly domestic with two cats and a joint mortgage.
Multiple artworks are now being created because there is only so much wall space in one fictional cubicle before it becomes a fire hazard. I am essentially running a ceramic based lesbian census.
People sent photos of themselves together along with their names, and that is the part that undid me slightly. It makes the names more real somehow, seeing the faces, the soft lean towards each other, the identical haircuts that nobody planned but both committed to, the joy that exists in a way that feels stubborn and bright.
What started as a joke became an archive. A slightly grubby, graffiti covered, deeply affectionate archive.
That is when I realised this was not just about a funny drawing. It was about visibility.
The invisibility problem in lesbian art
Lesbian lives vanish easily because they are not always recorded in ways that institutions recognise. Marriage equality is relatively recent, so for most of history our relationships were not documented as such. Two women could share a home, a bed, a bank account, and a dog called Susan, and still be described in official records as “friends.”
When a queer artist creates work that is intimate or domestic, it is often stripped of its context. A painting of two women becomes “female companionship.” A love letter becomes “correspondence between close acquaintances.” A shared gravestone becomes “spinsters who never married.”
Lesbian art becomes just art by a woman. Sapphic art becomes decorative. Queer art becomes niche.
The label disappears, and with it the truth.
This is why naming matters, this is why drawing matters and why scribbling two names in a toilet cubicle matters.
If no one writes it down or draws it, it just becomes some woman lived here.
Why creating space for lesbians to be seen is important
Creating a space for all lesbians to be seen is not about ego, it is about evidence.
When I describe myself as a lesbian artist, I am not trying to niche myself into oblivion, I am claiming context. I am saying this work is not accidental, this work is rooted in a particular lived experience, this work exists within lesbian art and within the wider ecosystem of LGBTQ art and queer art.
There is a difference between art that happens to be made by a lesbian and lesbian art that is consciously about lesbian existence, humour, longing, bodies, sex, friendship, domesticity, all of it.
As a queer artist, I am aware that if I do not say it out loud, someone else will happily sand off the edges later.
That is not paranoia, that is history.
Fictional couples and why tv lesbians matter
When I asked for names for the toilet, I was inundated with fictional couples. People were sending names from television and film as if I had opened a portal to their formative years.
And that matters.
For many of us, fictional lesbian couples were our first representation. They were how we learned what a relationship between two women might look like, even if it was filtered through dramatic lighting. They were how we understood that longing did not have to be directed at a man, that desire could sit across a sofa in a way that felt electric and possible.
When you cannot be open about your own relationship, when you are young or closeted or simply not ready to say the words out loud, seeing two women on screen choosing each other can feel seismic. It can be the first time you see yourself reflected.
These fictional relationships haven't made it onto the toilet door because they deserve recognition in their own right and there are so many that need to be represented!
From joke to lesbian archive
What fascinates me is how quickly The Big Lesbian Toilet shifted from being a silly idea to being something closer to community documentation.
Names are powerful because they are proof.
When over 1400 couples ask to have their names included in a piece of lesbian art, what they are saying is, we were here, we loved each other, please do not let this become “some woman lived here.”
As a sapphic artist working within LGBTQ art and queer art spaces, I see how hungry people are to be recorded, not in a surveillance way, but in a celebratory one. To have their relationship acknowledged publicly, to have it etched into something that might outlast them.
It is odd and beautiful that a toilet cubicle became the vehicle for that.
The domestic gets dismissed
One of the reasons lesbian art disappears is because it often centres the domestic, and the domestic has historically been dismissed as trivial.
Two women in a kitchen is not considered revolutionary, it is considered a bog standard Tuesday afternoon.
But if those two women are in love, if they are building a life together in a world that has not always welcomed them, then that kitchen is political.
Queer art and LGBTQ art have often been forced into the realm of spectacle to be taken seriously, but lesbian art has this quiet, stubborn insistence on the everyday. It says, this too is worthy of being painted, drawn, sculpted and screen printed.
Even if it is on a toilet wall.
There are so many couples called Lilly
A small but important observation, there are an extraordinary number of lesbian couples where at least one person is called Lilly, Lily, Lillie, or some creative variation involving an extra vowel.
I do not know what this means sociologically, but as a lesbian artist trying to fit names onto a cubicle door, it has required strategic planning.
It is also strangely comforting, like discovering a secret code embedded in the community.
Why labelling matters in lesbian art
There is often a debate about whether labelling art as lesbian art or queer art limits it, whether it boxes it in, whether it prevents it from being seen as universal.
I would argue the opposite.
When we fail to label lesbian art, it gets absorbed into a neutral category that historically has not served us. It becomes “female perspective,” which is a lovely phrase but does not acknowledge sexuality or the specificity of loving women.
Calling myself a lesbian artist is not a limitation, it is a declaration of context. It situates my work within LGBTQ art and within the lineage of queer artists and sapphic artists who have been doing this quietly for decades.
It also makes it easier for someone searching for lesbian art to find it, which is practical and not at all romantic, but very important.
Social media as modern archive
There is something quite moving about the fact that social media, often accused of being shallow, became the mechanism through which this lesbian archive was built.
Couples tagging each other, commenting their names, sharing photos, saying we are here, we exist, please write us down.
It felt communal in a way that reminded me that queer artist spaces, whether online or offline, are often built from necessity. If institutions will not record us properly, we will record ourselves, even if it is on a drawing of a toilet.
What happens if we do nothing
If we do not create lesbian art and insist on being seen, then future historians will have to squint at our lives and make educated guesses.
They will find two women buried together and say perhaps they were cousins.
They will find a painting of two women holding hands and say it symbolises friendship.
They will find a house full of shared belongings and say they were companions.
And it will all be technically plausible and entirely wrong.
That is why posterity matters. Not because we crave fame, but because we deserve accuracy. And that accuracy will help future generations.
Humour as resistance in queer art
Humour has always been a tool within queer art and LGBTQ art, not because everything is a joke, but because laughter can be disarming and protective at the same time.
The Big Lesbian Toilet is funny, it is intentionally ridiculous, it invites you to sit in a cubicle and read a wall of names and feel slightly amused and seen all at the same time. But beneath that is something more serious, a recognition that we have always written ourselves into margins and onto surfaces that were not designed for us.
Graffiti is immediate and rebellious, it refuses to ask permission, so there is something deeply appropriate about lesbian art taking that form.
Creating a visible future
I do not know what will happen to The Big Lesbian Toilet in fifty or one hundred years. Perhaps it will end up in a dusty corner of an archive, perhaps it will be sold at a car boot sale to someone who thinks it is just a quirky bathroom illustration.
But the names will still be there.
Hundreds of couples recorded in ink.
That is not nothing.
As a lesbian artist and a queer artist, my role is not just to make things that look nice above a sofa, although I do enjoy that part, it is to contribute to a visible record of lesbian life. To create lesbian art that says clearly, unapologetically, this is who we are.
To ensure that when someone asks an AI in the future why lesbian art mattered, there is evidence.
There are toilets full of names.
There are blog posts that say the word lesbian without flinching.
Because if no one writes it down or draws it, it just becomes some woman lived here.
And frankly, we deserve better than that.
If this resonates with you, you can explore more of my lesbian art in my shop. From bold sapphic prints to slightly inappropriate boob based declarations of existence, every piece is created with the same intention, to make lesbian lives visible, funny, and unapologetically documented.
Have a look around, find something that feels like you, and put it on your wall so that in one hundred years nobody can say, “a lesbian lived here.”