Life after Life

About

Highgate Cemetery is the inspiration for thirteen artists, all trained in portraiture, who bring their own personal interpretations to paintings of some of those who are buried there.  In doing so they discover the richness and diversity of their worlds and examine their legacies.

The Group explore scenarios in which different centuries come together, presenting those with contradictory and complementary attitudes.  They investigate attitudes to sexual mores, the environment, different cultures, the individual, and even the Cemetery itself.

Those being featured include:  Eva and Walter Neurath, founders of Thames and Hudson;  Shu Pao Lim, founder of the Chinese Community Centre;  William Friese-Green, inventor of the motion picture camera;  David Edward Hughes, inventor of the microphone;  Bert Jansch, folk/jazz guitarist;  Jane Arden, film director;  Mehmet Aksoy, filmmaker;  Berenice Sydney, abstract artist;  Elizabeth Siddall, artist and muse; Malcolm McClaren, visual artist and performer;  Charles Cruft, founder of the dog show;  Claudia Jones, journalist and activist;  Philip Harben, first celebrity chef;  Ernestine Rose, suffragist, abolitionist and free thinker, and the Lost Girls of Highgate, ten residents of a home for ‘lost women’.

With a wealth of artistic talent drawn from around the world, all of whom have very different cultural approaches to death and commemoration, Life after Life is a unique look at mortality, the march of time and the inevitability of our demise, from a unique Highgate Cemetery perspective.

The Beyond the Likeness Group consists of former and current Art Academy London students who met while studying on the Contemporary Portraiture degree course.  Members – who are from four continents and have nine languages between them – are:

Norman Frost;  Corrie Georgala;  Alicia Griffiths;  Patricia Gutierrez;  Kate Linden;  Constance Regardsoe;  Jess Routley;  Minnie Scott;  Paul Starns;  Ruth Swain;  Susan Terrones;  Richa Vora;  Belinda Wrigley.

Their work has appeared in various national competitions and galleries, ranging from the Royal Portrait Society, Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Mall Galleries, Ruth Borchard, Ashmoleum Musem, Holly Bush, London’s Newington Gallery, in the book ‘Portraits for NHS Heroes’ and in several online exhibitions.  All work in this exhibition is for sale.  Admission free.  

To book a place for the related lecture on 1 March please visit https://hlsi.net/lectures

Lecturem on 1 March 2022: Life after life: death and commemoration at Highgate Cemetery with Ian Dungavell.

Ian Dungavell is chief executive of the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust, the charity which runs Highgate Cemetery. An architectural historian and conservationist he has lectured widely on nineteenth-century cemeteries and Highgate in particular.

£5 per lecture (HLSI members free).  Sign up online by 1.00pm on the day.