Andrew Coombs 2025
Meditations on Gold

Andrew Coombs
Meditations on Gold
7 August to 20 September 2025

Studio 3

Meditations on Gold is a residency that refers to the work of Irish Symbolist Patrick Scott, one of the artists in the Grá exhibition. Through movement, performance and textiles, Andrew Coombs will open a creative dialogue with queer elders through Scott’s visual language of abstraction and use of gold. The project will play with the parallels between aesthetic minimalism and queer codes in a final promenade performance on 19 September for Culture Night.

This project is an opportunity to explore my choreographic and textile work with older non arts – professionals specifically from the Salt & Pepper collective, responding to the work of Irish Symbolist gay artist Patrick Scott. Exploring Scott’s meditation paintings for their circularity, use of stillness and colour gold, the project will investigate parallels between aesthetic minimalism and queer codes.

Referring to the vocabulary of voguing, a dance language deeply rooted in queer survival and visibility originating in the late 1980s, we will play with coded gesture and dressing up as an act of defiance.

Participants will be invited to work with fabrics and garments, not as decoration but as an act of reverence in a world that often marginalises older queer lives. Using simple fabric forms to evoke ritual and queer sacredness we will reclaim a space for fragility and radiance.

Andrew Coombs is a white African of Irish descent working internationally as a dance artist and performance maker, creating playful, participatory artwork with non-professional people of all ages. I work with movement and textiles to open up spaces of joyful disruption—where play, “dressing up”, and dancing become acts of connection, self-love, and subversion. My practice often challenges norms around gender, vanity, and ageing. I have a background in clothing and costume making and as a dance artist working with a variety of community and public settings. I have produced and directed children’s theatre and dance in London, UK. In the last 10 years I have been working extensively with older people, using accessible movement and playful interactions. I was born in the Witswatersrand where the richest gold deposits on earth were mined, gold dust is said to have coloured the air.

Instagram: andrew7coombs, Hackneychildrenstheatre, Allagesthursdays

Andrew received an Agility Award with thanks to The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon