millimetre: A Spell

21 Nov-13 Dec 2025

PV 20 Nov 2025, 6-9pm

Overview

Jem Southam, Myra Stimson, Joseph Wood, Louise Bourgeois
Artist’s unknown: Victorian miniature watercolour and 1920’s photographic postcard

millimetre is an exhibition space contained within a single picture frame. Devised by artists Finlay Taylor and Kate Scrivener, this space for group exhibitions forces invited curators to consider and exploit scale, intimacy and the close juxtaposition of artworks.

A spell, perhaps of time, conjures six works together from differing periods, the earliest an engraving from 1763 by Joseph Wood and the most recent piece a painting on wool from 2025 by Myra Stimson. In this millimetre exhibition at Kingsgate, the pieces continue to influence each other and the presence of Joseph Wood's work depicting a sorcerer summoning demons to protect a woodland is the largest piece, with the ink clinging to the aged and dirty paper for over two and a half centuries.

Jem Southam’s photograph from his collectively titled works A Bend in the River is shown at millimetre for the second time, now the reading of the misty river view with swans shifts slightly, perhaps becoming more ethereal, the distance of the camera from the scene exaggerated, we are peering into a world both contemporary and ancient. Placed nearby a postcard circa 1920 shows rabbits at their warren, but close inspection reveals all is not what it seems. Myra Stimson’s Field Red Top is set at the opposite corner of the frame to Louise Bourgeouis’ I have been to Hell and Back, these works cannot help but have a gravitational pull on how we feel about them, what may have been understood as Myra Stimson’s snowy landscape with a sky of good fortune becomes more foreboding and its repetitive stitched forms writh across the surface.

The tiny Victorian watercolour with its rural idyll is protected by its curved glass covering and gilt frame, this itself brings us back to the containment of the all the pieces within a sealed frame protecting them and us from direct exposure.