What I tell you in the dark

About

Set in an atmospheric crypt in central London, the show offers the viewer an exciting, experiential underworld.

Lucy Devenish’s practice is driven by her explorations of remote landscapes. Her work results from numerous journeys to far-flung coastal areas of the British Isles where she makes wild swims. Each long swim stands as an artistic act of endurance in itself whilst her activity in the studio deals with the mapping and memory of these immersive encounters with the coastline.

David MacDiarmid uses cutting, creasing, tearing, assembling. Crafting spurs the notion that these objects may have been made for a purpose, but their forms suggest they could be some type of scientific model, or an unidentified industrial remnant. The process of making is laid bare; this labour of crafting is visible in the mirror, wood, paper and card of these structures. Touch forms a connection, as a record of making and as memory of these everyday materials which we have experienced.

Kate Palmer identifies the word ‘sluff’ relating to small point release avalanches. Steep lines of descent can destabilize a weak layer lying near the surface of the snowpack causing a ‘sluff’ - a cascade of loose powdery snow down the mountain. This could also be understood in relation to psychoanalysis, where a ‘descent’ often causes structures that might have felt once solid to fall away during an analysis. This series of work then explores this falling, or potential space, between internal and external environments.

Luke M. Walker’s motivation is to capture and record the changing nature of the city. In a series of paintings that attempt to convey the processes at work on an underground construction site for Crossrail and by employing 3d satellite mapping imagery, the paintings are uncertain, hesitant and unresolved. They assimilate and estimate, showing structure, infrastructure and metastructure. Moments of clarity break down to reveal the fragility of the image and the truth of what it actually represents – a digital rendering from 400 miles above the surface of the Earth.

Sheila Wallis has been compelled to revisit and re-conceivethe work of the early post-mortem daguerreotypists because of their oblique yet inescapable continuity with our own experience. Familial care and concern, love and loss remain timeless rites of passage, whilst the transience of temporal existence remains inescapable.
The seeming alchemy of the Victorian daguerreotype, captured by the earliest cameras and fixed onto prepared plates is as unique as any watercolour. My project is to discover if these once private heirlooms might be made to speak of the more universal human themes of longing and limitation.