Live flesh: the fetish club art of Jo Brocklehurst – in pictures

Jo Brocklehurst’s vibrant illustrations were sketched out in the corners of 80s fetish and punk clubs, immortalising a flamboyant subculture. Her work is exhibited in the show Nobodies and Somebodies at the House of Illustration

Main image: Jo Brocklehurst Nobodies and Somebodies Photograph: Jo Brocklehurst

Fri 3 Feb 2017 02.00 EST Last modified on Wed 19 Oct 2022 11.04 EDT

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    Jo Brocklehurst illustrated the irrepressible characters of 1980s punk and fetish subcultures, full of leather, studs, bulging muscles and wild shocks of hair. An exhibition, Jo Brocklehurst: Nobodies and Somebodies, is at House of Illustration, London, until 14 May. All images: Estate of Jo Brocklehurst

  • Red Queen

    Brocklehurst was born in the 1930s – she was coy about her actual age – and attended Central St Martin’s to study art following earlier promise as an athlete

  • Miss Jacky Worp, 1978

    She sketched jazz musicians in the 1960s and became a fashion illustrator, before becoming swept up in punk, and became best known for her paintings of the anarcho-punk scene of the early 80s

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    Her subjects included Boy George, Marc Almond and Pina Bausch

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    She started visiting fetish clubs like Skin Two and Torture Garden, where attendees would make fantastical costumes from PVC, leather, metal and rubber. She would often sketch in the clubs themselves

  • 10 Die Eingeborene (The Natives) for Berliner Zeitung

    She also travelled extensively, working in New York, Amsterdam, Poland, Turin and more, and illustrating for the likes of Berliner Zeitung when in Berlin

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    Brocklehurst was half Sri Lankan. Recalling her to Vice magazine, her friend Howard Tangye, who taught at Central St Martins, said: ‘She’d had a lot of hard bumps. She wasn’t quite the pure English rose, and I think she copped quite a bit of prejudice’

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    Tangye describes Brocklehurst as ‘extremely beautiful, mesmerising, but incredibly self-conscious about it. She would do anything to make herself not beautiful’

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    Towards the end of her life, Brocklehurst created a kind of museum in her own home – an installation featuring a dainty Victorian drawing room laid out for tea, but with punkish paintings referencing Alice in Wonderland on the walls

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    She died in 2006. ‘That she was able to spend her life as a professional artist is an indication of both her profound talent and her unwillingness to compromise,’ wrote Marie McLaughlin in her Guardian obituary. ‘Jo lived the life of a romantic artist with the financial worries and the discipline of her work always coming first. Much of her work contrasted with her character: she was an observer, not a participant’
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