Voices of Pride: A Celebration of Stories, Expression, and the Paradox of Language at Clifford Chance

Hosted by Arcus, our global LGBTQ+ and allies' network, this year’s Voices of Pride exhibition showcased the rich tapestry of experiences and perspectives through the medium of art.

Featuring iconic Australian artist William Yang, rising talents Jeremy Smith and Lucy Abroon, and a bold lineup of emerging multidisciplinary artists, this exhibition sparks dialogue and brings powerful, personal narratives to life through visual and text-based works.

Explore the works below.

Jeremy Smith is a Sydney-based artist, curator, and PhD candidate whose work explores queer history and identity through intricate, hand-drawn counter-maps.

His drawings chronicle the hidden geographies of LGBTQIA+ life, weaving together personal narrative, archival research, and collective memory. Institutions such as the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney University, and the Australian National Maritime Museum have acquired Jeremy's work.

He is also a curator at Qtopia, Sydney’s queer museum, and DRAW Space, the city’s only gallery dedicated to drawing. Currently completing a PhD in Fine Arts, Jeremy’s practice is a love letter to his community, counter-mapping community, culture and history.

Since 1970, William Yang has photographed Sydney’s social life. In 1989, he integrated his skills as a writer and a visual artist and began to perform monologues with slide projection in the theatre. They tell personal stories and explore issues of identity.

Many of his performances have toured the world. His retrospective exhibition Seeing and Being Seen was shown at QAGOMA in Brisbane in 2021. He featured in the Biennale of Sydney 2024, Ten Thousand Suns.

He often works with Contemporary Asian Australian Performance teaching others his story telling method. His latest performance piece Milestone is touring four Australian capital cities in 2025.

Tom Luscombe is an established commercial photographer, educator, lighting technician and published author.

As an artist, he had his first solo exhibition in 1993, and first group show in 2007. Since then, he has exhibited on a regular basis at Contact Sheet and other fine art galleries in Sydney. His work appears in many collections, including that of a major Chinese art collector based in Hong Kong, Beijing and Sydney.

In 2023, he published the photo book Folly of Gossip, an exuberant and loving collection of images that document Sydney Queer street-life during the mid-1990’s.


Luke Hardy is an Australian photo artist, born in Sydney. He has lived extensively in Asia. Out of this experience he has built a body of conceptual portrait-based work evoking Buddhist and Hindu folklore and ritual, often involving water and purification.

More recent work contemplates altered states, dreams, metamorphosis and the thin line between the spiritual and the sensual. His subjects tend to be meditative, half-awake, sometimes somnambulistic.

Christian Jon Bonett (b. 1975, Bath, England) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working on Gadigal land in Eora/Sydney.

In this body of work, Bonett incorporates ceramic sculpture to humorously critique societal constructs of identity and gender through the vernacular of road signs, popular culture memorabilia and some dogs (because we all love dogs). Through playful context manipulation, the works provocatively transform, distort, and subvert these everyday objects, challenging our perceptions of these forms and their directional intent.

Bonett holds an MFA (Ceramics) from the National Art School, Sydney, Australia, a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Manchester School of Art, UK and a Bachelor of Art Education from UNSW, Australia.

Pansy is a multidisciplinary artist based in Sydney, Australia. Working with a multitude of different materials, Pansy explores a 'transformalism' within his practice, experimenting with painting, sculpture, installation, performance and drag.

Currently undertaking his Masters Of Fine Arts at the National Art School, he uses his artistic persona to visually manifest male femininity, representing an abundance of pride in his identity as an extremely flamboyant, feminine homosexual. Rooted in queer history and theory, Pansy plays with both abstraction and figuration, to visualise and celebrate the queer spirit through vibrating colours, psychedelic patterning and biomorphic abstraction. 

Samuel Luke Beatty (he/him) is an artist who uses graphic narratives and autobiographical storytelling to explore intimate realities of being transgender.

His works take the form of digital illustration, prints, comics, embroidery, quilts and murals. His art offers alternate forms of queer and trans representation to other gender explorers on similar journeys, from tomboy childhood gender euphoria, to affirming moments of gay trans masculinity.

Kim Leutwyler works across painting, installation, ceramics, print media, and drawing. The artist's current work focuses on themes of identity, queerness and the natural world. Leutwyler is known for vibrant and expressive paintings, which are exhibited widely across galleries and major cultural institutions in Australia and internationally.

Some of Leutwyler's recent accolades include finalist placements in the Archibald and Sulman Prizes as well as the Portia Geach Memorial Award. Several of the artist's works are included in The Lunar Codex, a curated archive of contemporary art launched via NASA to the Moon in 2024 and 2025.

Frankie L.A is a Sydney based artist who creates multimedia work utilising figure in context painting and objects of personal and cultural significance.

Currently in her last year of her MFA at National Art School, Frankie is investigating the experience of being a part of the second-generation Iranian diaspora through creating layered and textural works which speak to the history of domestic objects and to the attachment we have towards them. Each work is a disjointed, vibrant story; layered with repeated motifs, tiles, fire and paint. They hold stories, speak to memories and document a pathway back to reconnection. 

Kika Baker has a bachelor's degree in Fine Arts, majoring in Sculpture at the National Art School. She has exhibited in several artist run initiative galleries in Sydney, Australia. These include In Honey at the National Art School Library Stairwell Gallery, I Am Not My Body at Qtopia Sydney, Sequence at SCASS Backspace Gallery, among others.

Throughout Baker’s art career, a highlight for her was winning the Dr John Vallance Prize in 2023 for Sculpture. Kika’s process includes pouring plaster, cement, resin and concrete into found objects, exploring contrasting effects of hard and soft, and the familiar and distant. However, her works also speak deeply personal to her, delving into themes of presence and absence, fragmentation and imprint and memory.

Elisa Hall has been writing for about eight years, after having a late start. She joined a writing group and hasn’t looked back. She is also a painter, and a painting and drawing teacher. She really enjoys using words to create pictures and emotional responses. She also loves being an active participant of the queer community.

Elisa has been published in the Hope Shines anthology and the Grieve anthology 2019, and has also been a finalist in the Outstanding Prize multiple times and won their Miniature prize twice. She lives in the mid north coast, on Gumbaynggirr land.