Venue: Showcase Gallery

Don’t Please Tell Anybody is a project 30 years in the making, that being the length of time I’ve been collecting these lost notes and hundreds more like them.

Torn-up notes fascinate me. My inner ‘Sherlock’ delights in carefully recovering the fragments, reassembling them like shattered ancient history and then inferring the stories’ lost details. The urgent words and their inflamed response being recorded on the same page—as presented here—is something that neither writer nor receiver would have seen. These are unrequested repairs and it’s an uneasy feeling to even partially reveal such intensely personal moments. But that’s what writers and artists do—we explore and reflect the human landscape, finding hope and meaning in anguish and disorder.

The book launch coincides with the opening of the exhibition Tears, being further notes and street-find sculptures, gathered over a similar duration to the material for Don’t Please Tell Anybody.

Concrete Nature explores four individual relationships with urban concrete, through walking, commuting and recording experiences, memory and re-imagining .

Works are presented by Carolyn Blake, Jen Dixon, James Fowkes and Paul Newman. Their documents are translated through collage, painting and photography. Each artist presents alternative and overlapping perspectives; interpreting modernist infrastructure and its juxtaposition with nature, the romantic notion of the ruin as explored in art histories and the translation of urban concrete with materials including cardboard and paint.

The scenes set include motorway bridges above canal paths, multistory carparks, and railway line infrastructure. There is a connection here with transportation, the commute and moving through urban and suburban landscapes.