In Memory Of

This is a rather belated post aimed mainly at anyone who happens to be in or around Gloucestershire – or who enjoys visiting art galleries virtually.

I’ve a couple of pieces in an exhibition on the theme In Memory Of at The House of Smalls in Chipping Campden, which has been on for a couple of weeks already (hence this being belated), but which runs till 30 September.

It’s a fascinating mixed show of everything from painting through textiles to sculpture, and it includes a dolls’ house (set up as an art gallery) that contains the very smallest exhibits, which gives a rather brilliant hall of mirrors effect.

To my complete delight, I had a binding and a painting accepted – both newish, but there’s something pleasing about these being the earliest and the most recent media I’ve worked in (if work is the word).

The binding (detail above) is of Peter Scupham’s poem sequence Natura, housed in a cabinet of curiosities whose contents reflect some of the materials mentioned in the poem and some of the materials used in the binding. It’s in memory of Peter, who died last summer, and it’s also a bit of a reflection on the relationship between nature and artifice: the sequence uses many manmade images in its descriptions of natural phenomena, and the craft of binding uses many materials that are natural in origin but reworked for human ends (leather and gold, for example) in order to create an entirely artificial structures that protect and preserve linguistic constructs. The binding aims to make some of that visible.

The painting is one of my recent series of ghost houses, all of which rather conspicuously speak to the impermanence of human things, and which are just as conspicuously influenced by the demolition of my childhood home in 2019 and by other less material losses in the last few years. Its title is The Things We Do for Love, and it’s a more ambivalent offering than Natura, responding to a suggestion in the gallery’s call for submissions that ‘in memory of’ needn’t always be ‘in loving memory’.

For anyone in the wrong bit of the UK, outside the UK, or on a different continent entirely, see https://www.thehouseofsmalls.art/inmemoryof