In the basement of the Herbert Gallery in Coventry, Daniel Lismore is wearing a gown of pink chiffon and silver lame, a chainmail headdress and a full face of makeup, and wielding a glue gun over a brooch. It’s a striking scene for a Tuesday morning. But, for artist Lismore, it’s the norm. He is, as he says, a “living sculpture”.
Lismore wore something similar for his Ted talk in 2019, for a campaign for H&M in 2015, for a photo with Nigel Farage in 2016 (for this occasion he accessorised, with the word “cunt” and an arrow on his forearm), and for a selfie with the Princess Maria-Olympia of Greece posted a day after we meet. He says it typically takes abut 20 minutes to get ready and he wore the same throughout lockdown, albeit with “a big pair of slippers”.
Today, he is surrounded by about 30 sculptures that will be displayed in Be Yourself, Everyone Else Is Already Taken, Lismore’s exhibition that opens at the Herbert this month. Each one is a collage of clothing items, fabric and ephemera. One wears an Anthony Price jacket given to Lismore by Steve Strange. Also included are Boy George’s hat, a tribute to the Colston Four, Adam Ant’s stage outfits, an Extinction Rebellion flag, an XXXL FFP2 face mask, a Mickey Mouse glove and a jacket that Lismore made for Mariah Carey. “This stuff I wear nearly every day,” says Lismore. “I reuse things … people have given me things from all over the world. Every single thing in here has a story.”
Be Yourself, Everyone Else Is Already Taken (a phrase often erroneously attributed to Lismore’s hero Oscar Wilde) has been touring the world since 2016, but Lismore grew up in Coventry. He was brought up by his antique dealer grandparents – whom he calls mum and dad – in Fillongley, outside the city. So the Herbert is something of a homecoming. “It’s a 20-year journey,” says Lismore. “This show is like a mirror of what I’ve seen, in material objects.”
Lismore stops traffic with what he wears but he’s far from a loud personality. He has the poise and grandeur of an Old Hollywood star. “As I said in that Ted talk, confidence is a concept you can choose,” he says. Thankfully, this poise isn’t matched with Old Hollywood discretion. His anecdotes are peppered with his famous friends, from going to the Houses of Parliament with Vivienne Westwood and Pamela Anderson to meeting Stephen Fry as a teenager while dressed like Wilde.
His brushes with fame began early when his mum, worried about him being bullied, faxed Patrick Stewart. As a result, Lismore, a longtime Trekker, met Stewart at a fan convention. “He said, ‘You can more or less do anything you want to do in your life,’” remembers the artist. “And it just changed my confidence.” He continues: “When you’re a young, queer person, you don’t know why the world hates you, don’t understand it. And you probably don’t understand yourself.”
First experimenting with dressing up as a young teenager, he then moved to London to work as a model, and found kinship in the 00s club scene – at nights such as Nag Nag Nag and Boombox. It was here that he met Boy George, Pete Burns and more. “Everything was inclusively exclusive,” he says. “If you were weird and wonderful, you were in. The opposite of how society might treat you.”
Another formative experience was travelling to Kenya in his 20s and living with Maasai and Samburu people, working with charities to combat HIV and Malaria. “I realised that there was so much more to humanity than the western world,” he says now. Maasai jewellery is included in some of his sculptures but he is clear it’s not cultural appropriation. “Everything in here has been a collaboration or a moment with someone from the cultures of where these things come from.”
Lismore is often compared to Leigh Bowery, who was also friends with Boy George. He is resistant to the comparison. “I was introduced to Madonna a few weeks ago, as ‘the new Leigh’,” says Lismore. “And I was like, ‘I’m nothing like him really because I’m not a performance artist … I’m not out to shock.’”
While Bowery wore his outlandish outfits for performances and at nightclubs, Lismore’s take is 24/7. Living as a sculpture means he is sadly accustomed to abuse. “If we walk around, somebody somewhere, will say something,” he says. “If you follow 10 steps behind you will hear it. And that’s just the norm.” He has had “anti-gay zone” stickers stuck on his door, been punched in the face and receives anti-LGBTQ+ messages on social media.
Lismore is an activist as well as a living sculpture. He is an ambassador for Cool Earth, has worked with Greenpeace and campaigns for the release of Julian Assange and for LGBTQ+ rights, speaking out against a proposed anti-LGBTQ+ bill in Ghana and, in October, calling out politicians who had failed to help LGBTQ+ people to leave Afghanistan.
The ultimate aim, for him, might be “live and let live”. He is clear “I just want to be left alone” and describes a rare occurrence when this happened, though he was dressed up. “I went to a mountaintop in Iceland to practise my Ted talk,” he says. “This guy was hiking up and I was sitting there. He didn’t acknowledge me. He didn’t look at me. It was almost like I didn’t exist. It was great.”
Be Yourself; Everybody Else Is Already Taken is at the Herbert, Coventry, from 18 February to 26 June, part of the Coventry UK City of Culture programme.
