Oona Grimes : Conversations with Angels

About

Conversations with Angels is a new series of drawings informed by the life and work of John Dee (1527 - 1608) documenting 'actions' or seances mediated through his scryer, Edward Kelley. Locked in the secret interna bibliotheca of his house, Dee and Kelley pressed angelic spirits for the claves or keys that would enable them to decode the lost Enochian language. Enoch's Book of the Old Testament contained his own record of the language God taught Adam. Whoever discovered the Adamic language would rediscover the key of Divine Knowledge.
A catalogue with a text by Iain Sinclair accompanies the exhibition.
Alongside the drawings for Conversations with Angels, a separate room has been devoted to the correspondence in image and text between Oona Grimes and the writer Leslie Forbes. ABS NCES records the first two years of this collaboration, an unfinished journey that began at another exhibition in the summer of 2005 where Oona and Leslie met and expressed mutual admiration for each other's work. Oona then proposed an experiment: she would send Leslie an image, and to it Leslie would respond with words which would, they hoped, inspire Oona. When the correspondence proved interesting enough to continue, it was decided that there would be no deadlines set for the replies, no discussion of any map or direction that the travellers would follow. Characters emerged, a plot (its central mystery as yet unsolved), a theme...and a fractured timescale partly attributed to Leslie's epilepsy - which causes hallucinatory 'absence' seizures generated in her brain's left hemisphere - and above all, the freedom with which artist and writer have allowed the compass to swing freely between one hemisphere and the other.