In an age of infinite scroll, AI-generated imagery, and algorithmic desire, there is something quietly radical about an artist who reaches for scissors.
Calvin Holbrook, who works under the name Calvin H., is a British queer collage artist born on the Isle of Wight and now based in Barcelona, Spain. His practice is as deliberate as it is disruptive: sourcing vintage publications, cutting them apart with careful hands, and reassembling the pieces into photomontages that hold a mirror up to gay culture, desire, and the sometimes uncomfortable machinery of modern queer life. Now, his work takes a well-deserved place in Inspiró magazine issue 5, a beautifully curated publication that brings together 12 international creatives in each edition.
We're thrilled to feature him here.
Scissors Over Screens
Calvin's work begins, and ends, in the analogue. He works exclusively with sourced vintage publications: old pornographic magazines, retro cookery books, gardening periodicals, lifestyle glossies from decades past. There is no digital manipulation, no AI assist, no shortcut. Just paper, scissors, and an artist's unflinching eye.
The results are photomontages that feel both playfully absurd and quietly confrontational. A pornographic figure is spliced mid-action into a 1970s home-baking spread. A naked body becomes part of a gardening layout, surrounded by tips on pruning and planting. The juxtapositions are jarring, and that's entirely the point.
As Calvin describes in his own words: "Working mainly with queer pornography, the artist alters pre-existing narratives through precise photo montage. Porn puppets are spliced with images from retro lifestyle, cookery and gardening magazines, creating skewered commentaries on the hyper-sexualization of gay men within popular culture and modern queer dating."
What emerges is a kind of visual satire, one that asks, gently but pointedly, what it means to be a gay man today, when your desires, your body, and your identity are simultaneously commodified, fetishised, and filtered through apps designed to reduce you to a thumbnail.
The Art of Considered Chance
There is a particular magic in how Calvin speaks about his process, a combination of patient craft and happy accident. While each piece may appear simple at first glance, the reality is far more considered.
"Closer inspection reveals that the form, colour and positioning of each cutout is critically considered with regard to the main image. Achieving this perfect combination of puzzle pieces is a mix of patient perseverance as well as chance and coincidence."
This is collage as meditation. Each cut is deliberate; each placement tested and reconsidered. And yet the work retains a looseness, a quality of discovery, as though the images were always waiting to find each other across decades of print culture. The result sits somewhere between puzzle and poem, between critique and celebration.
His series titles alone signal this layered wit: The Daily Grindr, Heavy Petal, Strange New Growths, You Gotta Say Yes, Garden Boudoir Experiment. Each one winks at its influences while sharpening its critique.
An Antidote to the Algorithm
Calvin's practice carries an explicit philosophical position: the handmade as resistance. In the artist's own framing, his photomontages "exist to keep the beauty and simplicity of analogue alive in stark contrast to today's overwhelming digital and AI revolution."
Alongside the meditative nature of hand-cutting each individual piece, these techniques further cement his practice as "an antithesis to our fast-paced digital lives", a phrase that feels more urgent with each passing year.
There is something deeply considered about choosing, in 2025, to work the way Calvin does, slowly, physically, materially. While the art world embraces generative AI and digital fabrication, he is still at a table somewhere, surrounded by old magazines, placing one fragment beside another until it feels right. It's a quiet act of defiance that gives his work an integrity and warmth no algorithm can replicate.
A Career Built on Queer Provocation
Calvin's exhibition history reads like a map of the international queer art scene. His fanzine Hate, a raw, confrontational early work, was included in AA Bronson's landmark Queer Zines exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2023), having previously appeared in shows at Maureen Paley gallery in London and at the Paris Ass Book Fair. His solo exhibitions have taken him from London's White Cubicle to galleries in Madrid and Barcelona, and his work is now crossing the Atlantic with an inclusion in the International Paperworks exhibition at Northwest Arts Center, Minot State University in the USA (2026).
Throughout it all, the commitment has remained the same: queer life, examined honestly, rendered by hand.
Inspiró Issue 5: 12 Creatives, One Vision
Calvin Holbrook is one of 12 international creatives featured in Inspiró magazine issue 5, published by The Male Muse. Inspiró is a magazine that understands the power of putting extraordinary artists in the same room, or at least on the same page, and issue 5 continues that tradition with characteristic ambition and elegance.
If you haven't yet got your copy, it's available now via The Male Muse store.
And if Calvin's work has caught your eye — which it should — you can explore his full portfolio, series by series, at calvin-h.com.
Follow Calvin on Instagram: @calvin.holbrook
