Launch: Thursday 17th April
Open: Wed - Sat, 11.00 - 17.00
19/04/25 - 14/06/25
Farah Allibhai, Emii Alrai, Alice Banfield, Abi Birkinshaw, Mohamed Hassan, Dead Paisley, Tina Rogers, Luke Roberts and Roxy Topia & Paddy Gould
What is your personal specialist subject? We all have particular things that we are alert to, things we are fans of, the collections, repetitions, accumulations of experiences or objects that run parallel with our everyday lives. Sometimes there’s a very fine line between the largely-positive word fan and the slightly-too-far fanatic. Sometimes these things are excitedly public, other times they are private, lone pursuits. Sometimes we might not fully understand what drives us toward them. We’ve brought nine artists together to respond to this prompt, with new works and existing collections.
Some of the artists respond to popular culture, particularly when it is experienced in their formative years. Roxy Topia and Paddy Gould’s work has been heavily influenced by pulp film and low budget cinema. This comes to the foreground in their recent research, into Astrovision, a video rental shop in Gloucestershire in the mid 80’s where Roxy’s nan used to work. Abi Birkinshaw is bringing their idol into their art, Dolly Parton is leading the way as she has done for Abi many times over the years. Luke Roberts embraces contradiction and divergence from cultural norms and expectations around identity. An obsession with cars is the subject of Luke’s new work in sculpture and painting.
Other artists go further back, into childhood experiences and ways of understanding them. Alice Banfield, in the mode of subversive fables and personal mythology, explores transition objects. Developed from characterful toys of her own childhood, her sculptures and drawings reflect the overloved objects, that are both grounding, and pleasingly distancing from the real world. Tina Rogers has a moment that she escapes to, a fantasy moment from a Disney film and has made it into a colouring book, a repeated drawing, keeping in the lines of herself again and again.
Some artists explore obsessions, or repetitions as ways of navigating the world around them. Farah Allibhai is making several repetitions of one action, somewhere between obsession and ritual – a simple shelf that forms an altar, a shrine, of gathered items that hold significance and hope. Mohamed Hassan is looking at generational obsession. His father was as obsessed with photography as he is. There is a compulsion to the way that Mohamed makes work, he responds to life with photography.
There is also a look at collections, at accumulations that gain significance by their number. Dead Paisley has a habit of collecting the overlooked, unwanted and unusual. Her most sacred acquisitions are teeth - tiny relics of the body. She is shifting gears from curator to artist by displaying her collection in our warehouse, which used to be a dental manufacturing workshop. Emii Alrai, often traveling for her work, presents 49 postcards from a large personal collection, reflecting her research trips and diversions, from ancient artifacts to volcanos through elvis in to pure kitsch.