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Lighting of the Sails: Kiss of Light by David McDiarmid

23 May – 14 June 2025

Pulsing with energy, and the spirit of the underground, Kiss of Light celebrates David McDiarmid’s specific alchemy of lust, rage and hope.

Defying classification, McDiarmid’s work encompasses the complex and interconnected histories of art, craft, fashion, music, sex, gay liberation and identity politics.

Australian Arts Review

Useful information:

To resist, to hope, to dream

A defining voice of late 20th century radical counterculture, David McDiarmid fused art, fashion, nightlife with bold activism and unapologetic self-expression. 

On the 30th anniversary of the artist’s death, Lighting of the Sails: Kiss of Light transforms his life’s work, rooted in activism and provocation, into a new animation projected onto the Sydney Opera House for Vivid Sydney. 

Organised by mood and feeling, Kiss of Light is a slow dance of texture, colour, feeling and ideas, tracing the artist’s punk, queer sensibility. Featuring four key bodies of work —the Bedsheet Paintings, Disco Kwilts, Kiss of Light and Rainbow Aphorisms — the animation draws forward McDiarmid’s practice to the present day, broadcasting the experiences of a repressed minority while embodying complex truths, absorbing fear and preserving memory. 

Across seven minutes, Kiss of Light reveals how McDiarmid used irony, humour and fierce intimacy to celebrate diverse gender and sexual identities. By honouring the utopian underpinnings of his work, Kiss of Light is a rallying cry for equality, inclusion and freedom, reminding us that joy, curiosity and creative rebellion build a better world. 

Commissioned and presented by Vivid Sydney and Sydney Opera House.
Co-curated by Dr. Sally Gray, Gill Minervini and Micheal Do. 
Animated by VANDAL.

With thanks to

The Australian Queer Archives, Melbourne

The Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, 

Artbank, Sydney

The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne

Brian Sayer and Garry Sommerfeld, photography

William Yang photography

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