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As a curator who has been at the forefront of contemporary art for almost two decades, Gemma Rolls-Bentley sits down with Hadley Stewart to reflect on the impact of queer representation in art and her journey from South Yorkshire to the international arts scene.
Gemma Rolls-Bentley remembers curating her first art exhibition like it was yesterday. A student at the University of Edinburgh at the time, she found an abandoned travel agents in the Scottish capital, united her favourite student artists, and secured £100 from the university’s art history department to cover expenses. By opening night she’d managed to negotiate everything for free – perhaps a sign of the international art curatorial career she had ahead of her. This meant that those £100, “A lot of money at the time,” she points out, went solely on wine. “Opening night was wild,” she recalls over video call. “We had queues out of the door and the room was sweaty. There was this energy.”
Almost twenty years later, Rolls-Bentley says the experience was memorable for many reasons. For one, the godfather to her two children was one of the artists featured in the exhibition. What’s more, Rolls-Bentley believes that it formed the foundation to her approach as a curator. “I think the thing that really sticks with me from that opening, and that has carried on through all of my curatorial work, is the formation of community around the art and around the exhibitions,” she says. “And how exhibition making can be a really effective way of bringing people together.” It was also a learning curve for the young art curator in the making. The exhibition almost got closed down, because of her choice of window display. “It was…. controversial,” she says, raising an eyebrow.
I tell her that she’s almost having a full circle moment this year, having returned to the high street with a brand partnership with Whistles for Pride month, where she has curated window displays of queer artists in London Covent Garden, Brighton and Manchester. “Oh yeah! I hadn’t really thought of it like that,” she replies. These window displays are just another way Rolls-Bentley is trying to make art more accessible to the public. “A shop window is great, because just think about how many people will see that that wouldn’t necessarily walk into a gallery.”
What does she make of the fact that some people find art galleries intimidating spaces? “It’s a real shame that people still feel like that, but they definitely do still feel like that,” replies Rolls-Bentley. “I think that feeling has been deliberately constructed by the art world, which has historically been very exclusive. I would just say art is for everybody, and it’s always really important to remember that the most important thing is the artists and the art.”
Art galleries and exhibition spaces should be open to all, argues Rolls-Bentley, who believes that everyone should feel empowered to make these spaces their own. “The kind of conversations that we see happening in art are so broad and diverse, everybody would find something that they could connect to in a gallery somewhere,” she adds. “It’s just about people having the chance to find that work and be in galleries to have the opportunity to connect.”
Alongside the public’s access to art, Rolls-Bentley seems equally passionate about supporting artists who are navigating an industry that can sometimes feel exclusive and financially challenging. “Public funding is very hard to access,” she explains. “I enjoy working with brands like Whistles, because a lot of brands have got the kind of financial ability to support artists, but they don’t necessarily know how to do that, or know how to do it well. And so it’s for me, as the curator, to step into that role of bridging the gap between a brand and an artist.”
This notion of feeling like an outsider from the art world is something that Rolls-Bentley knows all too well. Born and raised in South Yorkshire, she grew up in a village on the edge of Sheffield. Her grandmother introduced her to art: “She was an artist, although she wouldn’t have called herself one.” Having earned a scholarship to study at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, her grandmother had a sliding doors moment, when she turned it down and married Rolls-Bentley’s grandfather, before going to work in her parents’ shoe shop in Totley, a village south of Sheffield. “I think there was always a little bit of sadness that she’d not followed her career in art,” reflects Rolls-Bentley.
As a child, Rolls-Bentley would be taken to galleries by her grandmother, who was excited by her interest in art. One trip that she remembers vividly was to the Graves Gallery in Sheffield. “It was a special pilgrimage to see the George Stubbs painting of the racehorse, Whistlejacket,” she says, the painting now hanging in the National Gallery in London. “I remember my grandmother’s excitement about it, and that got me really excited.”
Fast-forward a few years and a teenage Rolls-Bentley was, by her own admission, quite academic and really naughty. If she wasn’t down at the local botanical gardens smoking cigarettes and hanging out with people she shouldn’t have been hanging out with, she would be holed up in her school’s art room. “It was my way of staying out of trouble,” she says. “I think art from quite an early age became a sort of safe space for me.”
Gifted with a flare for both maths and art, Rolls-Bentley chose the former for her degree as she moved to Edinburgh for university. She tells me that she was grateful for the Scottish education system’s flexibility, which allowed her to study a minor in art history, alongside mathematics and artificial intelligence. Arguably somewhat of a pioneer, Rolls-Bentley went where no art student had ventured before: the School of Mathematics. What did her tutors make of her mix of disciplines? “The art tutors were actually okay with it,” she says. “But the maths faculty weren’t impressed at all.”
Yet it wasn’t the suspicious gaze from her tutors that Rolls-Bentley felt the most on her arrival in Edinburgh, it was from fellow art students. “The whole thing was quite bizarre,” she says of that time. “A lot of people I met there were quite posh and they really looked down their noses at me because I was from Yorkshire.” The experience was an awakening for Rolls-Bentley, who says that she didn’t have much insight into the British class system until starting at university. And when it came to her art history classes, she quickly realised that she was already on the back foot. “Everybody else there pretty much had studied art history at A-level,” she says. “You couldn’t do art history at A-level in Sheffield, even though I went to quite posh school, so I already felt a bit out of place.”
Left with what she now describes as a feeling of imposter syndrome, I wonder, what motivated her to overcome this and pursue her studies and eventual career in the arts? “I met artists,” smiles Rolls-Bentley. “I gravitated toward those people and started hanging out with them.” She would visit their studio spaces and witness first-hand how they worked. It was an eye-opening experience that left her wanting to be part of the art world. “I think that’s where I discovered that I had this deep interest in being involved with artists and their creative process,” she explains. “And once that door had opened, I don’t think it could have shut again.”
Her perseverance paid off. Rolls-Bentley, who graduated from Edinburgh with a degree in art history before moving to London to study a master’s at the Courtauld Institute of Art, is now an internationally sought-after curator, writer and creative consultant at the forefront of contemporary art. Her recent curatorial work include Realms at Carl Freedman Gallery, Ultraviolet for Cardion Arts, Tschabalala Self’s first public art project at Coal Drops Yard in London, the Tom of Finland Art & Culture Festival, and the Brighton Beacon Collection, which is the largest permanent display of queer art in the UK. She also curated the group exhibition Dreaming of House at Leslie Lohman Museum of Art in New York City in 2023, as well as hosting the accompanying podcast series.
Alongside her work with Whistles for Pride 2025, this year she curated a giant billboard in Dalston Junction in London, with artist Zach Toppin. Rolls-Bentley also joined forces with E-J Scott to co-curate Talisman, a group exhibition of LGBTQIA+ artists that is presented by Cardion Arts in partnership with The Museum of Transology. Sea State, an exhibition by Maggi Hambling and Ro Robertson, currently on display at Wolterton Hall in Norfolk until December 2025, has been co-curated by Rolls-Bentley and Simon Oldfield.
Looking back at her curatorial career, it seems clear to me that Rolls-Bentley is passionate about platforming LGBTQ+ art that reflect our community. “It feels very important, because throughout art history queer stories have been suppressed, left out or erased,” she says when I ask her about the wider impact of showcasing LGBTQ+ artists and artwork. “I think there are many queer artists who’ve gone on to have great success, like David Hockney, for example, but how often is their queerness actually being discussed?”
Rolls-Bentley argues that by not discussing the queerness behind artwork and artists, people miss out on an opportunity to see themselves reflected in the work, because it is not being contextualised. “I think we live in a world that is increasingly challenging for queer and trans people, and that art can give us a lot of power. There’s a lot of space within art for people to connect, get validation and understand themselves better.”
And in particular against the current political backdrop of transphobia, I add. “Absolutely, I think that art can play a really important role in starting conversations and helping people understand each other,” she replies. “That feels really important to me and that’s why I wrote my book.” Queer Art: From Canvas to Club and the Spaces Between was published in Spring 2024 to critical acclaim. “I wanted people within the community, whether they know anything about art or feel that art is relevant to them or not, to see that there is all of this art that tells our story. That can mean a lot to us.” She also hopes that her book will enable people from outside the queer community to engage with queer art, as a means of better understanding the experiences of LGBTQ+ people.
Speaking of queerness behind the work, what does it mean to Rolls-Bentley as a queer woman from a small village in Yorkshire to now be such an important and powerful force in the art world? “I feel so grateful that I have managed to carve out a career for myself where I’m making a living, but more importantly, I’m having an impact,” she says. “If I can do anything to help this world be a bit better, then it means I’m being a useful member of society.” Growing up in the 80s and 90s, she tells me that she felt a lack of queer representation and cultural references. “I always joke that there weren’t any lesbians on Corrie when I was growing up, and if there had been, it would have made a big difference.” She credits the queer characters on Coronation Street for helping to get her mum “on board” when she came out.
Although she lives in London now, Rolls-Bentley says she is proud to be from the north of England and maintains close ties with her home region. As part of her book’s publication, she attended events across the country. One memorable event she tells me about is a talk she did in a wine bar in Todmorden, West Yorkshire. “There were only 30 spots and it sold out straight away,” she says. “People came. Everybody bought the book. It was a really engaged audience.” She beams as she recalls that night, adding that the audience spilled into a pub down the road to continue their conversations. “These events shouldn’t just be happening in London and New York.”
Accompanying geographic inequalities, there remains, in her view, snobbery in the art world. “It’s such a shame, isn’t it?” she says. “Art is a universal language. It’s this great connector. It’s for everyone and by anyone. But there’s all this gatekeeping that goes on.” She believes that change is steadily coming, highlighting more women and people of colour being appointed to positions of leadership across her industry, for instance. She hopes this will influence greater diversity amongst the artists that are being given opportunities.
That said, Rolls-Bentley equally empathises with those who are trying to find their place in her industry and those who don’t yet see themselves reflected in it. “I didn’t really know how to navigate the art world as a northern lesbian,” she laments. “It was tricky. Now, because I have been professionally successful and I do have a platform and get lots of opportunities, I talk about how proud I am to be northern as much as I can. It just feels really important for people to be visible and make changes. That’s how we’re going to influence change for those who come from different backgrounds.”
Gemma Rolls-Bentley is a curator, creative consultant and writer who has been at the forefront of contemporary art for nearly two decades. (Photo credit: Christa Holka).
