Earley

This exhibition should be imagined as a pool fed by ornate fountains at either end of a columned bath house; the spouts carved in marble as tortoise and fish. Or as two opposing bubble machines, singers, loudspeakers, or flood lights. In this way, the monitors that face each other across gallery space are generative of the artwork in between. In the way these are soaked, inflected, or quickened. Like flowers or hatching battery chicks, the lines of prints are already delaminating, both formally as empty frames and unframed prints. But also, in terms of ‘content’, or imagery, which multiplies or peels off like butterflies, as religious, biographical, animal and flower-based allusion. Crows picking and feeding, silhouetted against the white of the gallery walls like Brueghel’s corvids in the snow. The frames, cast in resin, fiber glass and papier-mâché, are presented as both individual sculptures and as framing devices (parergon). Rendered as synthetic wood and ‘craft’, titled in relation to places, names and ideas referenced by the artist’s mother, who was born in Derry, Northern Ireland in 1936, and lived there with her grandmother and cousins until 1949 when she moved to Walsall in England (‘not Warsaw in Poland’) to live with her parents and the rest of the family. This possibly spurious Irishness, is also referred to in the film Earley which provides the title for the exhibition and is presented on the monitor to the right as you enter the space. Merging sub-Beckettian monologue with the ‘Horror’ formats of dementia and ‘First world’ problems of ‘over-living’, this involves a filmed performance/ conversation between a figure and a sculpture at a suburban railway station near Reading (which is near London) in the UK, ‘...sweltering in melting pollen, mosquitoes, coagulating ideology’ and smeared with the cliches of serial killers, religious zealotry and/or eco-vengeance. The second film Fox, 2025, which faces you at the far end of the gallery, is composed using the Exhuberant Blooms animated typeface, writing the story that begins with ‘a smiling dead fox at the bottom of a disused well’ and continuing from this point to describe a monstrous and miraculous death-birth. Exuberant Blooms animated typeface is described as ‘... an expression of beauty and transformation ... revolution even ... but with a hint of playfulness and irreverence. The future will arrive come what may and the mighty will be eaten by worms. Compost for future transformations. Our time will come! Including a full alphabet, lower and uppercase, figures and special characters’.