When Bradford community radio profiled my friend Colin Lloyd in 2016, the interviewer listed his occupations thus: “Teacher, printmaker, artist, drummer, musician, actor, performer, gay activist and cultural observer of Bradford, the city he grew up in and loved”. Colin, who has died aged 64 of pancreatic cancer, was a hugely creative and compassionate man.
He was born in Bradford, one of seven children of Florence (nee Whittaker), a care worker, and Vincent Lloyd, then working in the city’s textile industry. Colin went to Buttershaw comprehensive school, then notable for a drama department run by Janet Beard, who encouraged him to act and helped him improve his reading skills via Shakespeare.
Besides producing successful actors, Beard created the Barnstormers touring theatre company, and living and working with this troupe as a teenager, Colin was in a creative milieu that encouraged his talents and accepted his sexuality without stigma. He became involved with the Gay Liberation Front, beginning his lifelong passionate and articulate political engagement.
Aged 20 and working at the Alhambra theatre in Bradford, Colin met Alan Richardson, an artist, and they became life partners (and in 2006 civil partners). They both then went to work at Yorkshire Television, Colin in the costume department, which brought stability and a house in Bradford. Ten years later, Colin opted for his other creative obsession and enrolled at Bradford College of Art. He had been making art since his adolescence, and welcomed the chance to become a mature student.
Completing his fine art studies at Sheffield Hallam University, in 1992 he was invited back to Bradford to teach, an offer he gladly accepted: ever since his schooldays he was excited by the transformational possibilities of good teaching.
After gaining an MA in printmaking, he worked from 2009 at Salford University, where he taught BA and MA students painting, printmaking and multimedia until his retirement in 2016.
Colin understood the importance of new media for artists to communicate and show their work, deftly using digital media as a promotion platform for his own practice which, for a radical gay man who had lived through the Aids epidemic, was unsurprisingly concerned with memory, loss and queer sexuality.
An inspiring mentor, he energetically contributed to Foldworks artist studios in Todmorden, set up to widen access to art facilities, the Positive Lives photographic exhibition run in collaboration with the Terrence Higgins Trust to document the impact of HIV/Aids, and Café Despard, a radical cabaret group founded in the 1980s with mostly LGBTQ+ members – three examples of creative Bradford ventures that generated international impact via programmes, collaborators and travelling venues.
Colin is survived by Alan, by his mother, and by his siblings, Carol, Fred, David, Andrea and Susan. Another sister, Janet, predeceased him.
