EXHIBITION DATES : In person and online from 6/2 – 22/3
FOR PRESS RELEASE : click here
Floor 2, Room 1
INTRODUCTION :
A hand plants a known seed in to soil and a known plant then begins to grow. Yet, some seeds are carried away by the wind only to find themselves on harder ground. Names too can drift over time, pausing, becoming refracted. ‘Vincent’ belonged to another, a resonance of which persists through fragments, generations and legacies, in the spaces between what was and what might have been. So let’s begin there - in the invisible line between presence and absence, a place for forcing change and letting be.
A young boy worked at a bench, coaxing fragments of the world into form. That imperative has persisted: where hands meet material, curiosity shapes ritual and play and labour are entwined. Every stitch, every mark, every found object carries a weight of memory, the trace of a body in motion, the residue of a life both lived and imagined. Each gesture holds the potential to transfigure the ordinary into something resonant – as a reliquary of matter and breath.
The work occupies thresholds. Surfaces are stitched, marked, layered and worn; objects become instruments, not only of sound or sight but of passage. Some respond to the land, some hum with memory, others simply await the listening. Here, absence is presence, darkness is ground, and matter is animated by the invisible. Through this alchemy of making, the personal becomes universal...”
A young boy worked at a bench, coaxing fragments of the world into form. That imperative has persisted: where hands meet material, curiosity shapes ritual and play and labour are entwined. Every stitch, every mark, every found object carries a weight of memory, the trace of a body in motion, the residue of a life both lived and imagined. Each gesture holds the potential to transfigure the ordinary into something resonant – as a reliquary of matter and breath.
The work occupies thresholds. Surfaces are stitched, marked, layered and worn; objects become instruments, not only of sound or sight but of passage. Some respond to the land, some hum with memory, others simply await the listening. Here, absence is presence, darkness is ground, and matter is animated by the invisible. Through this alchemy of making, the personal becomes universal...”
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The Hermit assumes a soft quilted form within which a rubber pumping valve is placed – its body breached, implying a point of contact and of dependency. The Runner, borrowing industrial materials, yields to gravity and contact, its points of friction defining both its presence and its constraints. The Watchful hovers like a human head, a convex copper arch suspending fabric, leaving an emptiness at its centre that gestures toward vigilance and memory, a dream of lineage carried forward.
Across these works, and in pieces such as Generator, Reliquary or the installation A Firework for Vincent, found materials, fibres, seeds, chalk, feathers and wax are transformed into symbolic conduits for circulation, connection and the passage of time. Chalk speaks of pressure and purity, feathers of freedom and fragility; Alexander seeds of healing and historical resonance. The materials bear traces of absorption and excretion; the body is implicated, whether as a point of contact or measure. Even the smallest paper collages - The Valley Is Deep & Its Walls Tall, Constellation series and Firmament - map time, chance, memory, topography, and relational space through folded, stitched and layered surfaces.
In relation to Burri, we feel the poetry of scarred surfaces; to Tàpies, the resonance of humble matter; to Beuys, the gesture as ritual; to Bourgeois, the intimate excavation of self; to Abramović, the body as conduit for thresholds and endurance. To Kiefer’s ruins and accumulations, echoing the folding of history, memory and the earth into form. Here, making is at once an offering, a confrontation, a listening and a reckoning.
To enter is to move lightly, to notice, to linger, to allow the work to unfold on its own terms. A Firework for Vincent is at once a self-portrait and a constellation, a memory and a possibility, a light cast into the darkened field of what might have been. It is a place where what is broken, buried or absent is neither lost nor explained, but becomes a site of transformation, a threshold of perception and an invitation to inhabit the invisible.
Joseph Clarke, 2026
ONLINE CATALOGUE :
“Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world… we must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomsoever we may be.”
Floor 2, Room 2
EXHIBITION ARTWORKS (CLICK FOR FULL DETAILS) :
Floor 3
A FIREWORK FOR VINCENT :
Silt
To strive for the revealing of another side; a way into opening, expansion; towards unity. Always there are prompts; clues through both the stepping-stones and tools. A means to decipher. In nature, the sensation of a fallen leaf upon the back of one’s hand.
With this journey, I enter into an exchange with the rhythmic pulse of a solitary wind turbine. The lone sentry; the guardian, tethered centrally within the tightly bound enclosure. Each time a different song is brought into being - an initiated breath; interfacing, I am brought back to mine. You are over there, and I am over here, reaching out, harmonising, exchanging breath for words that can never be fixed, and are all too often lost to the wind.
What is left after the flood? These memories only breathe the residue of what came before. In the way that silt withdraws and generates; compounded remnants of processes no longer served, yet still integral.
To strive for the revealing of another side; a way into opening, expansion; towards unity. Always there are prompts; clues through both the stepping-stones and tools. A means to decipher. In nature, the sensation of a fallen leaf upon the back of one’s hand.
With this journey, I enter into an exchange with the rhythmic pulse of a solitary wind turbine. The lone sentry; the guardian, tethered centrally within the tightly bound enclosure. Each time a different song is brought into being - an initiated breath; interfacing, I am brought back to mine. You are over there, and I am over here, reaching out, harmonising, exchanging breath for words that can never be fixed, and are all too often lost to the wind.
What is left after the flood? These memories only breathe the residue of what came before. In the way that silt withdraws and generates; compounded remnants of processes no longer served, yet still integral.
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The Flowing Stream
Melting begets melting: an invisible stream silently runs beneath blankets of snow - wearing away, little by little, until the point of collapse. Generation.
There is an equilibrium to all things. This is not static but made up of moving parts. The erosion of walls; what do the surfaces of these walls feel like? Are they smooth and slippery to the touch, or are they rough and jagged? Is there friction or congruity? Of course, this can never exist without fractions of both.
Always there is a rising and falling, domination and submission, resisting and an entering, with each part existing as an active agency. Neutrality is no longer of relevance in this sense. Each aspect simply coexists; each mutually exclusive, interdependent, and ultimately come to settle under the weight of conversation, and only in part owing to my hand. It is these forces that in a large part determine character - the coexistence of opposing and sympathetic elements.
Enclave
One is offered glimpses of the outside, always premature - recovered parts pieced together - then a zooming in; a pressing of silence, compressed and protracted. The birds scatter, but where do they land?
I place myself in between the land and you. This land also belongs to you, though I know it is hard to know. There is no longer distance.
It was noticed in your wrists first; in those once and still strong, dextrous, elegant hands that drew the straightest of lines from one point to another. The in-between, if only we knew. Now those points are no longer fixed, they are far from a page, and now your mind creates the shapes of constellations, which we clamour to hold in our memory - to fix those points, to build form from, and upon.
Jamie Mills, 2026
BIOGRAPHY :
Jamie Mills is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in West Cornwall, UK. His practice is underpinned by an investigation into the dissemination of gesture between materiality and environments, referencing both the internal and the external. The work is about memory, relationships, connection and the very act of making itself. The principal working materials within his largely monochromatic vocabulary, are often sourced and repurposed from natural environments or borderlands and include salvaged remnants of fabrics, natural pigments, as well as inorganic matter that functions as a counterpoint to the organic. Pared down relationships between material narratives and process serve as allegory to psychological or emotional states; often surrounding memory, grief, and an exploration into the embodiment of these processes on a personal and universal level. These concerns facilitate a distillation of form that exists at a threshold between the abstract and the concrete, reflecting a space in which a minutia of gesture and a humility of material can communicate vital expressions of intimacy and connection. His images, assemblages and intuitively composed sound works can be viewed as markers to a series of internal journeys or rituals informed by a poetic dialogue between material, form, environment, and personal histories. Jamie has collaborated with both UK, and Internationally based artists and filmmakers, and has work held in public and private collections within the UK, Europe and the USA.