The fabulous visions of Andrew Logan

At 5pm on a pitch-black winter’s evening, a long queue is snaking up a stairwell towards an explosion of colour. Fashion designer Zandra Rhodes is holding a pop-up art market in the Rainbow Penthouse in Bermondsey, South London. In one corner stands her friend Andrew Logan, a vision in neon-pink from his embroidered Indian hat to his trainers.

He stands behind tables filled with his fantastic, wearable art. Bees, dragonflies, leaves, hearts, smiley faces, CND symbols, and fried eggs become brooches, cufflinks, earrings, bracelets, and necklaces in all shapes and sizes. Each piece is handmade and unique, collaged together from fragments of glass, stones, shells, glitter and beads. Logan also makes larger pieces and portraits in the same way, and paints watercolours, but these tiny works, signed on the back by him in white pen, are an essential, and accessible, part of his oeuvre.

In October, he turned 80 - but the man who was a huge part of London’s nascent punk and LGBTQ+ party scenes shows no signs of stopping making his art, or teaching others how to make their own. “My work’s about transformation,” he tells me. “It’s about taking ordinary things and making them into the most gorgeous thing in the world.” I spot a Christmas star he’s made, fitted onto an extendable radio aerial – he touches my shoulder with it, like a fairy godmother,.

We speak properly a few days later, when Logan is back at his main base in Berriew, a Welsh Borders village in Powys, Mid-Wales. He moved here with his partner of 53 years, Michael Davis, in 1986, after falling in love with the area while house-sitting nearby for the actor Julie Christie.

In 1991, he opened a gallery of his work on Berriew's river Rhiw, housed, with fitting eccentricity, in a former squash court. It’s full of fantastical treasures: sculptures of his friends turned into goddesses, a huge Cosmic Egg commissioned by the Greater London Council in 1983 to represent ‘peace’ for an Easter Parade, and an archive of the influential Alternative Miss World competition, which still runs, which he founded in 1972 (a subversive take on the once-popular beauty pageant, in which contestants can be of any age and gender, and are judged on poise, personality and originality – categories Logan borrowed after an outing to Crufts in his 20s).

Born two months after the end of the Second World War, Logan grew up as the middle child of five in Witney, West Oxfordshire. He talks fondly of his naval officer father, Bill, who used to make things “out of nothing” for Logan’s mother, Irene, and useful items for the family kitchen, or ornaments to hang on the walls. “You must remember that after the war, there were a lot of things you just couldn't buy, so you had to create them,” Logan says.

His maternal grandfather was also the first person to import pearl buttons into Britain from Japan, he adds: “These were the seeds from which my art germinated!” He fondly remembers a “very free childhood”, cycling around churches to do brass rubbings, making Christmas cards, and setting up a Happy Club in his garden with his siblings when he was eight – a neighbour threw a tuppence over the fence to become a member, he recalls, and the club still continues today, for his fans, as a member-only Facebook group.

Logan’s crafting didn’t stop as he got older. While studying architecture in Oxford, he painted his silver bike a fluorescent yellow-green, “when colours like that didn’t really exist – I had to hunt a small pot down from Germany”. He also painted the bedroom walls of his student flat in sky blue, stencilling clouds on top of them – then built an eight-foot papier-mache yellow daffodil to sit over the bed. “Oh, and the bedspread was covered in grass.” He laughs. “I just loved doing it!”

Then came a one-off experience with LSD that changed his life completely. It was a summer evening with the sun going down, he recalls: “just the two of us, with somebody else sitting with us, just in case something happened – very proper. I picked up an orange from a fruit bowl on the table, and threw it at the room’s dark blue wall. Normally the orange would drop down, but this orange just kept going.”

He didn’t do LSD again, he says. “God, no. I know people who used to have it for breakfast, but why would you? But that experience taught me, well, if I can throw an orange through a wall, then I can do absolutely anything. That was the change, right then, for me – when I started to make small sculptures.”

Logan’s sculptures have always been put together from the objects he collects. When he was young, shoes, women’s dresses and swimsuits were his bag, many of which he used in the Alternative Miss World competitions, then he started collecting small items that excited him on his travels . He “went mad” in rock shops in the Atlas Mountains and fell in love with the “explosive colour” in India. “The objects I collect are sometimes natural, sometimes man-made – but they could be also something I could just pick from the up from the gutter,” he explains. “It’s all to do with what I see in the world which excites me, and how I could maybe turn it into something else.”

To put together his wearable art, Logan uses araldite, the rock-solid adhesive, mixing it into a paste, then glueing his colourful fragments into resin bases. He uses a lot of glass, and had to smash it up for his creations until the early 1990s, when he chanced upon a demonstration of a Japanese glass-cutting technique while walking through Covent Garden. “Here was this whole new world, where suddenly I could cut out specific shapes,” he says. “It was like being able to use a brush. It changed my life.”

It’s crucial to Logan that he makes work by hand. He talks excitedly about a workshops he’s doing in Jaipur, India, early in 2026, where mud-resist printing, hand-painting on silk, and embroidery are still regularly practised. “So many artists don’t make their final work – even Dali sent his glass art off to be made. But to me, when you look at a Matisse drawing, and know it was done by his hand, that feels really important.” Why?  “Because what I want to give to the world is joy, and it’s only through my hands, and my own connection with that joy, that I can share that.”

For larger projects, Logan loves to collaborate. He gushes about a Berriew blacksmith, Will O’Brien, who is building him a structure for an ambitious self-portrait (“the actual head itself is about six foot high, and it's got a tree on the top of it!”). In the past, Logan has also recruited friends to help make his bigger pieces, but turned the crafting into a party, an approach which he’s expanded into work with community groups and schools. “I love inspiring other people to make things that are personal to them. We always have a wonderful gang.”

Logan’s enthusiasm today reflects his crucial role in London’s art scene in the early 1970s. Living in a city where there were few artists, and as he remembers, “only two of three clubs”, he hosted weekly parties where major figures in the art world got to know each other. At his 1976 Valentine’s Ball, a friend, Malcolm Maclaren, brought along a new band he was working with, to play their first public gig. “The studio had a corrugated roof, so when they started to play, the reverberations were unbelievable.” Logan never saw The Sex Pistols again.

His Alternative Miss World contests were also sensations. Early judges included David Hockney. An early winner was Logan’s good friend, Derek Jarman. A famous host was the American performance artist and actor Divine. Richard Gayer’s 1980 film about the event, I Wanna Be A Beauty Queen, hasn’t been digitised, Logan says, sadly, but fabulous clips of it exist online. A 2025 Netflix short, Too Disgusted To Be Confused, also captures the event’s anarchic, joyful spirit shortly before the arrival of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.  “All my friends died,” Logan says. “A generation was wiped out. Michael and I remained constant, which is why, actually, we’re still here.”

At 80, Logan continues to carry the legacy of those who travelled with him. His future projects include more workshops internationally and in Berriew, where his partner is a community councillor, plus a portrait of Celia Birtwell among roses, based on a photograph taken when they went to Kew Gardens together in 1970.