Brooke
Brooke
A bespoke wall cabinet for the client’s weaving wools, in American cherry veneered on to birch plywood, with three solid cherry drawers divided to hold small cotton reels.
Height 210, width 166, depth 26 cms.
A bespoke wall cabinet for the client’s weaving wools, in American cherry veneered on to birch plywood, with three solid cherry drawers divided to hold small cotton reels.
Height 210, width 166, depth 26 cms.
January 2018 / Loudest Whispers – Peace and Activism, St Pancras Hospital, London NW1
Collaged digital prints
These works all use photo-collage to meddle with the site of my home. It was thrilling to be able to drag my house away from the neighbours and introduce a grove of trees into the space simply by wielding a stanley knife.
The title, If it wasn’t for the ‘ouses in between, refers to a cockney music-hall song about the power of imagination to transcend the limits of physical space:
‘with a ladder and some glasses you could see to Hackney Marshes if it wasn’t for the ‘ouses in between’ – Gus Elen, 1890s.
March 2020 / Unseen Labour, The Art Academy, London SE1
Collaged digital prints, MDF
The gable end is the most concealing aspect of a house, rarely having doors or windows. Instead it occupies the ‘hard’ public domain of architecture and street furniture. My collages play with exposing the ‘soft’ hidden domestic interiors and their demands for unseen labour.
February 2021 / Wilderness, St Pancras Church Crypt, London NW1
Collaged digital images
Another attempt at subverting the impassive solidity of the gable end, following on from Controlled Zone do not Wring.
This time I’m playing with what the house keeps out, rather than what it hides within. The inscrutable brickwork not only pulls rank on its soft and private interior space; it boasts of keeping us safe from the wild world outside.
The way things are going, that remains to be seen.
March 2023 / Hair of the Dog, Four Corners Gallery, East London
Digital images
1,2: Artist’s photographs and text
3: Found image and artist’s text
4: ‘Belmont Workhouse inmates being marched off by the police after rioting over being fed only ‘watery porridge’ 1910’, artist’s text
5: Photograph Regina Mamou, Amman 2010, artist’s text
6: Photograph from Root and Bone magazine, date unknown, artist’s text
I’ve been exploring the way the English language is saturated with references to the non-human world, belying the long held view of humans as distinct from and superior to nature.
In this series of works I’m using text in play with image; viewing the outcomes as both concrete poetry and visual object. Some include found photographs while others use my own images. I’ve produced them in poster form; I’d like to see them fly posted on the street alongside appearing in the gallery.
December 2013 / Undercurrents at St Pancras Church crypt, London NW1
Blankets / 170 x 50 x 45 cms
Installing the (reduced) stack of blankets in a crypt space, again wedged into the architecture, had a totally different meaning. Those buried there are beyond the comfort of a blanket, as far as we know.
Is it a comic or futile gesture to the dead, or a reminder of the physical pleasures of life while it lasts?
January 2010 / Wimbledon College of Art foyer, London SW19
Blankets, string, plywood, MDF / 375 x 50 x 45 cms
Blanket stack was the outcome of an obsessive plan to assemble one blanket for every place I’d ever slept; to be able to see the extent of my nomadism as a mass. However, the thought of some 460 blankets overwhelmed me. The completeness of a single column from floor to ceiling seemed a more elegant representation of a lifetime of nights.
I enjoyed the combination of abstract formality – the hint of a bar chart, with the poignant physicality of the blankets themselves; their upspoken histories of good and bad nights. I also wanted to show the building being supported by a column of sleep.
September 2012 / News from Nowhere, Merton House Priory Museum, London SW19
English elm, brass screws, battery lights / 214 x 29 x 19 cms
My work engages both with William Morris’s utopian novel News from Nowhere and with the space occupied by the Priory museum and ruins.
I was struck by the dissonance between Morris’s light filled utopia and the dark, subterranean location of the museum.
Introducing an artwork about Morris into this space felt challenging – the architecture of the space spans 9 centuries and the museum already holds a disparate collection of objects. The fact that the ceiling is effectively the underside of a dual carriageway – the A24, something which Morris would have loathed, adds to the dissonance.
I made a set of 21 ‘utopian fruit boxes’ to form a column which appears to support the ceiling and hence the road above. My boxes are the same size and design as traditional small fruit boxes, but made as beautifully as possible, using English elm, which would have pleased Morris.
In its own mini utopia, with its imagined cargo of fruit, Utopian fruit column supports the intolerable weight of the road above it.
May 2017 /Houserules art happening, river Lea towpath below Eastway, London E9
Timber, paint, bolts / 460 x 4 x 4 cms
Another play at supporting an immense weight in an absurd way. Daughters of Blanket stack and Utopian fruit column.
Lighter and more playful as this was an outdoor, one day event where the work was left to the mercies of the passing public. Some of the sticks were taken, probably as firewood or building materials.
July 2019 / Out of the Woods, Bleddfa Arts Centre, Powys, Wales
Douglas fir, birch plywood, stainless steel mirror, birch log, 100 x 30 x 95 cms
Birch is a pioneer species, ‘able to sustain harsh conditions with casual indifference’. It is not highly prized as timber in the UK. This birch tree was grown and felled for firewood, possibly the lowest value end use for a tree. I wanted ‘rescue’ it and present it as an object worthy of reverence and wonder. I intend this on every level from sheer pleasure in the beauty of its bark, to the scientific imperative of carbon capture, which is embodied in both living trees and intact felled timber.
Apple of my eye spent three months outside in the orchard. By November, the mirrored surface was mottled with windfalls and snail trails; a whole new artwork.