This publication builds on the What’s the Matter? Queer Materiality and Communities of Making symposium that took place in June 2022 at the Glasgow School of Art. It prompted the inauguration of the Queer Materiality Research Group initiated by a group of like-minded artistic researchers in the School of Fine Art. The event led to a discussion about the shapeshifting queerness of queer research and queerness in the widest sense of the word, especially as it may be applicable to artistic research, whilst considering the viability of the conceptualisation of an idea of the ‘exquisite’ as providing a framework for artistic research practices. In turn, this led us to ideas of excess and spillage, of things that are difficult to describe, the indescribable matter of making and the limitations of the lexical, the live time of performance and the temporality of sound, the fragmentary, the fleeting, the sweating of the queer and the real into existence and the endless potential of secretion, hence, the volume’s title: Queereal Secretions: Artistic Research as Exquisite Practice.

It contains contributions by Ben Cranfield, Anne Robinson, Giulia Astesani, Misha Gafarova, Adam Kaasa, Elizabeth A. Hodson, Jane Topping, Henry Rogers, Owain Train McGilvary, Philip Ewe, Becky Šik, Finlay McInally, MaryLynne Wrye, Michelle Hannah,  Asa Johannesson, Nicky Coutts, Liz Murray, Roshana Rubin Mayhew, Richard Sawdon Smith and Francis McKee.