BEARING UP

24 Feb-9 Apr 2026

PV 28 Feb 2026, 12-2pm

Overview

The exhibition includes recent works focusing on colour, shape and mark-making, referencing Modernist precedents. The work explores ideas about the artist-teacher identity, art work as demonstrations, re-evaluating working practices and coming to terms with change. The exhibition will include a series of 400 collage and painted patchworks made during an extended lockdown during the pandemic.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I set out to make a body of artwork which would map our passage through. My original question was how might it be possible to use an auto-ethnographic inflected creative visual practice as a way of documenting and reflecting on the pandemic experience from our particular viewpoint as clinically extremely vulnerable people in a rural town in Suffolk UK. Early in the pandemic we were instructed to ‘shield’, and we were still leading very restricted lives two and a half years later in July 2022.  

When we first went into lockdown, I began drawing a visual diary and established the habit of posting the results on social media each day, sharing the work with others doing similar things. As the pandemic progressed and we found ourselves still living restricted lives, I turned the drawings into more colourful, collaged paintings made on new patchwork surfaces re-mattered from old teaching demonstrations, resources and other artworks. These are all 50cm by 50cm and worked over, obliterated, or extended, with new painting, colour, and collage. These palimpsests represent a coming to terms and a mourning of leaving classroom teaching, a dialogue with the past identity of artist-teacher whilst seeking a renewal through creative reuse. The painting, colour, layering and mark-making accumulate in a commentary on old demonstration works and other detritus from my art teaching days as I continue to untangle the artist-teacher identity. These residues are discarded, destroyed, preserved and celebrated within these artworks as I move on from teaching to form another type of practice. The titles are a concrete poem made of the language of the pandemic.

In later works in the sequence, the observational moment present in earlier works has been frozen in time by making a stencil, freezing a moment of observation from January into a repeated glyph that I modulate and modify each day. The later paintings are more repetitive with relatively simple means, reflecting our restricted lives, but still becoming intricate explorations of complex surfaces and marks, between past and present, between symbol and metaphor. These mark the later stages of trying to reconcile with Covid, with our restriction, with constraint, and to the world as it is. The sequence numbers over 400 square paintings and a number of earlier 'diary' drawings made at a rate of five a week from April 2020 to July 2022.

I have continued to think about how to use creative practice as a way to research something that was happening quite slowly, a change of consciousness which we may not understand until much later. In this later phase, when we were ‘living with Covid’, the outside world remained dangerous to the clinically vulnerable. The artwork became a creative dialogue with the process of making work at all under the circumstances. For two and a half years, the works existed between execution, conference presentations and regular social media posts. Eventually, as we were at last released from our personal lockdown, the idea of hanging all 400 of the works in a gallery space and inviting a crowd in to see them has become possible.