Leo Costelloe, Kitchen

Leo Costelloe’s first artist’s book brings together writing and photography that reflect on intimacy, queer kinship, memory, alienation, and the emotional terrains of domestic life.

Shaped as much by autobiography as by imagination, the text draws on family narratives, a childhood in Canberra, and the formative experience of coming of age in London, to sketch shifting portraits of home as both a place and a feeling. Costelloe explores understandings of femininity, care and self-actualisation through impressionistic vignettes in which intimate recollections sit alongside performance and fantasy.

Costelloe’s photographs extend the writing’s themes, capturing domestic atmospheres, details and quiet moments of tenderness, sometimes edged with a surreal unease.

An introduction from Tate curator Fiontán Moran situates the publication within Costelloe’s wider practice, linking their fascination with the construction of glamour and the rituals of homemaking to broader questions of gender and class.