Robert Montgomery: The People You Love Become the Ghosts Inside of You

15 Oct 2025-12 Apr 2026

Overview

Robert Montgomery’s light sculpture, ‘The People You Love Become the Ghosts Inside of You’ (2010), joins our season of exhibitions at Charleston in Lewes as a contemporary echo of the ‘Two Roberts’ story. Inspired by the loss of his close friend the artist Sean Watson, the piece is a meditation on love, loss and memory – how those we care for stay with us, quietly shaping who we are.

The artist says, ‘This piece is about how love endures beyond death. It’s my experience that when we lose people who are very close to us the relationship still continues. I wanted to turn the word “ghost” into a positive word that could speak of that continuation of love. In a way it’s a hopeful piece to help us through grief – it’s about the fact that love continues, that love is actually stronger than death.’

Montgomery was born in the same region of Scotland as Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, and in a similar small working class town. He grew up in Prestwick in Ayrshire, just a few miles from, and almost exactly halfway between, Colquhoun and MacBryde’s childhood homes of Kilmarnock and Maybole.

We also present a new painting by Montgomery which imagines Colquhoun, MacBryde and their friends reborn – or appearing as ghosts – on Primrose Hill just after dawn on 4th September 2025, the day Damian Barr’s novel about them was published this year. You can see this work as part of ‘Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun: Artists, Lovers, Outsiders’.

The works by Robert Montgomery are loaned courtesy of the artist and Halcyon Gallery.

‘The People You Love Become the Ghosts Inside of You’ is free to visit in the atrium on the first floor at Charleston in Lewes.