🚉 Public Transport Access
Sydney Opera House, Bennelong Point, Sydney
Location: Sydney Opera House, Bennelong Point, Sydney
Dates: 23 May – 14 June, 2025
Cost: Free
A defining voice of late 20th century radical counterculture, David McDiarmid fused art, fashion, nightlife with bold activism and unapologetic self-expression.
On the 30th anniversary of the artist’s death, Lighting of the Sails: Kiss of Light transforms his life’s work, rooted in activism and provocation, into a new animation projected onto the Sydney Opera House for Vivid Sydney.
Organised by mood and feeling, Kiss of Light is a slow dance of texture, colour, feeling and idea, tracing the artist’s punk, queer sensibility. Featuring four key bodies of work —the Bedsheet Paintings, Disco Kwilts, and the Kiss of Light and Rainbow Aphorisms — the animation draws forward McDiarmid’s practice to the present day, broadcasting the experiences of a repressed minority while embodying complex truths, absorbing fear and preserving memory.
Across seven minutes, Kiss of Light reveals how McDiarmid used irony, humour and fierce intimacy to celebrate diverse gender and sexual identities. By honouring the utopian underpinnings of his work, Kiss of Light is a rallying cry for equality, inclusion and freedom, reminding us that joy, curiosity and creative rebellion build a better world.
With thanks to
The Australian Queer Archives, Melbourne
The Powerhouse Museum, Sydney,
Artbank, Sydney
The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne
Brian Sayer and Garry Sommerfeld, photography
William Yang photography
Country represented by installation: Australia
