Auto Italia presents Sensual / Mutual, the first major institutional solo exhibition in the UK by Del LaGrace Volcano. Surfacing unseen bodies of work from the 1970s and 80s, the exhibition focuses on Volcano’s time in San Francisco and Santa Fe, tracing queer, feminist, leather dyke, gender-variant, and land-based communities in the process of making themselves visible.
Often described as a legendary dyke photographer, Volcano is not only a pioneering voice of their generation, but one of the most urgent artists working today, whose profound influence can be felt across the visual vocabularies of contemporary queer art. Across more than five decades, their work has traced the political, social, and cultural shifts that have shaped LGBTQ+ histories, from the aftermath of Stonewall and the emergence of lesbian feminism, through Section 28 and the AIDS crisis, to the present-day rise in anti-trans and far-right ideology.
Throughout their career, Volcano has developed a distinctive photographic practice that has immeasurably shaped queer, trans, and feminist visual culture. Working across portraiture, documentary, staged studio photography, and collaborative image-making, they have produced images that are formally precise, erotically charged, politically engaged, and deeply intimate. Their practice centres communities in processes of self-creation, resistance, pleasure, and survival, challenging dominant representations of gender, sexuality, and embodiment.
Crucially, Volcano is not a detached observer but an embedded participant in the worlds they document. Their images emerge from lived proximity, friendship, desire, and shared political struggle. Across their practice, image-making is understood as a relational and ethical act, framed by consent and collaboration — one that resists extraction and is instead driven by reciprocity between photographer and participant, community and image.
Volcano’s work emerges from and contributes to a lineage of radical self-representation in which photography becomes both a political tool and social space. Their photographs are not simply records of subcultures, but carefully constructed sites of encounter: composed, staged, printed, cropped, and held in tension between eroticism and tenderness, humour and defiance, intimacy and revolt.
While Volcano is widely known for their erotically charged staged and studio photographs, Sensual / Mutual turns toward a slower, more intimate register within their practice. The exhibition foregrounds tenderness as much as eroticism, revealing a body of work that is at once political and deeply personal; tough yet tender.
The exhibition brings together key bodies of work from three formative sites: Scott’s P.I.T., a legendary leather dyke bar in 1970s San Francisco; the Goodman Building, an artist-run hotel on rent strike against the city; and ARF — Asylum for Rowdy Females and Dogs — a collectively owned womyn’s land commune in the mountains above Santa Fe, New Mexico. Across these sites, Volcano records and participates in forms of intimacy and political imagination that existed outside dominant cultural narratives.
Developed during periods of intense political and social struggle in the United States, these works trace the emergence of insurgent queer spaces, collective imaginaries, and communities in revolt. The images were made amid the fractures of second wave feminism, including the feminist sex wars, lesbian separatism, and the policing of trans bodies within certain feminist spaces. Against these exclusions, Volcano and their peers forged sex-positive, gender-queer, and explicitly trans-inclusive practices, insisting on forms of kinship that moved beyond rigid ideas of gender and sexuality. Works such as their photobooks Love Bites and Sublime Mutations, both subject to censorship and restricted distribution, speak directly to these contested histories of representation and refusal.
Rather than historicising this material, Sensual / Mutual insists on its present urgency. In a contemporary context marked by housing and cost-of-living crises, the closure of queer nightlife venues, and escalating transphobic and xenophobic violence, the exhibition asks what it means to return to images of collective life and resistance. These spaces are understood not as utopian relics, but as contested and lived environments where queer life was actively made possible under precarious conditions. From bars to communal housing to land-based feminist collectives, the exhibition maps a geography of queer world-making that challenges the assumption that social progress is linear or guaranteed.
By situating these images within the present, Sensual / Mutual reflects on how such spaces functioned not only as sites of refuge, but as laboratories for new social forms, where kinship, desire, labour, and political commitment were continually redefined. It also considers how these forms of collective life have been eroded under contemporary neoliberal conditions, in which affordable, communal living, political organising and queer nightlife have become increasingly difficult to sustain or imagine.
At a time when trans and queer rights are under renewed attack in the UK and globally, Volcano’s work offers a vital lens on histories of resistance and the fragile, contingent nature of queer visibility — not as nostalgia, but as an active resource for thinking about how queer life is lived, lost, rebuilt, and defended.
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