Paul Harfleet

Paul Harfleet is an award-winning, London-based interdisciplinary artist who has exhibited internationally. He conceived and runs The Pansy Project, an artwork and an activist movement which plants pansies at the sites of homophobic attacks around the world. Starting in his home city of Manchester (UK), The Pansy Project has spread from New York to Berlin and beyond. Paul's short documentaries, closely tied to specific cases of Pansy plantings, have been shown at various institutions and...See more

Paul Harfleet is an award-winning, London-based interdisciplinary artist who has exhibited internationally. He conceived and runs The Pansy Project, an artwork and an activist movement which plants pansies at the sites of homophobic attacks around the world. Starting in his home city of Manchester (UK), The Pansy Project has spread from New York to Berlin and beyond. Paul's short documentaries, closely tied to specific cases of Pansy plantings, have been shown at various institutions and festivals including the Everybody's Perfect Festival (Geneva), The Spencer Museum of Art (Kansas), and the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa). With travel restricted during the pandemic in 2020, Harfleet began Birds Can Fly, a queer exploration of ornithology. This ongoing project is a manifestation of Paul's life-long love of birds and reflects a resurgence in the cultural appreciation of the natural world, post-pandemic. Pansy Boy comes with a field guide to the flowers and birds contained in its pages. The book is inspired by the author's childhood, where he felt that tug between the world's natural beauties and a world that could be vicious to gay children. See less