22 October 2021 – 02 February 2022
As one moves through space, a constant double movement connects interior and exterior topographies. The exterior landscape is transformed into an interior map – the landscape within us – as conversely, we project outward, onto the space we traverse, the motion of our own emotions. Space is, totally, a matter of feeling. It is a practice that engages psychic change in relation to movement.
Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts, 2007
Borrowing its title from the book titled Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts by scholar and author Giuliana Bruno (2007), the inaugural exhibition focuses on the sense of place, space, encounter, networks, relations and touch. It is, in part, inspired by the Deleuzian philosophy of the fold, where matter is seen as porous, spongy, a fluid multiplicity and a boundaryless continuum connecting the outside to the inside. Approaching surface as a threshold, a connective tissue or interface between art forms, we see more clearly where subjects, space and place connect. The works develop relations across art, architecture, and psychoanalytical thinking, looking at what passes between a surface, insisting that the object itself extends well beyond the image and bringing internalised sensations and thinking to the forefront in a cryptic, other worldly and seemingly abstract way.
Hayley Lock, October 2021
Fay Ballard
Fay Ballard’s drawings in the exhibition form part of a series of works exploring memories of a motherless childhood provoked by her father’s death in 2009. Discovering photographs of her mother for the first time, Fay began to draw in order to reinstate her, to make her both tangible and real.
Ben Cove
In Ben’s words: Paintings embrace multiple forms of representation, moving between mimesis and abstraction – things to hold onto amongst the uncertainties. A bank of images that includes architecture, furniture, artefacts, product design and depictions of the body serve as source material. Images are selected both for their formal interest and for the position of authority they come to occupy through shifting narratives and processes of association and assimilation…What remains is clearly constructed, a fiction built on a series of narratives resulting in something that perhaps only makes sense to itself.
Ben Cove (1974 – 2016)
Lewis Chamberlain
Lewis Chamberlain’s subdued interiors allude to a disquieting and uncanny sense of the familiar. Often depicting fragmentary objects of childhood through a domestic scene, Lewis freezes moments of supposed playfulness to present psychologically charged and mysterious scenes.
Adam Dant
Adam Dant’s original watercolour drawing made for Psychobook published by Princeton Architectural Press, takes its reference from long forgotten historical psychological tests and object paraphernalia. Part comedy, part self – help, the reimagined House of Personalities Test evokes memories of psychometric adjudication, in a colourful and upbeat way.
Karen Densham
Karen Densham’s current work is comprised of playful sculptural ceramic objects made in ceramic. Reflecting on the cultural heritage of the streets around the Spitalfields district, Karen was drawn to the rich history of Huguenot and Jewish refugee immigrants and their associated silk weaving, tailoring, and furrier skills, as well as late 1800 music halls as sites of popular entertainment and moral corruption.
Tim Ellis
Tim Ellis’s most recent work combines his interest in aesthetic art movements with his love of organic and geometric patterns to form hybrid artworks that map spaces and represent abstract diagrams and journeys. Following on from the earliest cartographers who looked to the sky rather than the earth for their starting points, Tim follows in a rich tradition of creating maps that are rich with undiscernible abstract codes and symbols.
Justin Hibbs
Justin Hibbs’s prints are part of a series entitled ‘Dis-United States’, made in response to a newspaper graphic of the U.S. flag after the election of Trump in 2017. The materiality and age of the paper (almost 150 years old) records a passage of time and context far greater than our present ‘moment’ from which the starting point was taken. For Justin, these works operate as a series of questions about how to negotiate content, context and meaning through the language of abstraction.
Hayley Lock
Hayley Lock’s research interests concentrate on the Occult and occult practices with a particular focus on female otherness within mediumistic practice, identities and locations. Navigating both the digital and the analogue, capturing both real and imagined dialogues across parallel time frames, Hayley’s work for this exhibition takes it focus from architectural sites, personalities and magical practices performed both in and around the Spitalfields area.
Jason Thompson
Fluid multiplicity connecting the interior to the exterior are represented in the three works presented for this exhibition. Jason Thompson’s process of painting marks in response to the shape and qualities of the surface he is working on, echoes its own existence through repeated forms. Taking each repetitive action as a self – replicating loop, the rhythmic action of drawing and painting allows for improvised patterns and forms to emerge.
Richard Wathen
Richard Wathen paints fictional portraits that invite ambiguity. The age and gender of the portrayed are often uncertain. “I was interested in portraying someone at more than one point in their life; taking the cubists’ idea of multiple viewpoints and applying it to time”. The figures seem fragile, lost in contemplation, perhaps considering the incommunicable sensations of being alive.
Rieko Whitfield
Rieko Whitfield’s work, Regenesis is a container project of world-building and speculative mythology that spans mediums such as moving image, performance, songwriting, and sculpture. Subtitled An Opera Tentacular it is a non-linear, three-act rock opera of cyclical life, death, embodiment and community, set in a world healing from the apocalypse. Rieko’s performances channel supernatural beings who heal the broken body of the earth through collective care.