MAGPIE’S EYE
LAURA BYGRAVE. COLOUR BLIND PAINTING WORKSHOP.
ALEX CROCKER. GRANT FOSTER. DIDO HALLETT.
ADAM HOLMES-DAVIES. PAUL HOUSLEY. MOLLY MARTIN.
TAHMINA NEGMAT. LAURA WORMELL.
Curated by Laura Bygrave and Alex Crocker
Grant Foster, Dissolved in a Pitiful Little Heap of Secrets
Blackbird Rook presents
at the TCHC Viewing Room
Omega Business Park, Alton, Hampshire GU34 3YU
Viewing by appointment
“For both of us, early encounters with art came from massive compendiums like The Art Book and The World of Art - long before the internet and formal art education. In these books, the story of art was fragmented, often organised alphabetically rather than chronologically. This arrangement led to sudden shifts in mood and style, as well as surprising pairings: Kirchner next to Krasner, or Hesse next to Hawkins, rather than dictated by a traditional canon.
It was in that purely image-driven, nonlinear space that our fascination with painting began, for painting that emphasises materiality and touch, It felt like a shopping list of painting possibilities. We weren't looking for academic approval or coherent movements, we were looking for texture, gesture, the thrill of paint doing something unexpected. That early experience shaped the way we both approach painting now: as something intuitive and tactile, where ideas often come second to process, and meaning emerges through the act of making. There's a pleasure in that materiality, and in the risk that painting always carries: the risk of collapse, of excess, of the image dissolving just as it begins to cohere.
What unites this group is a shared attentiveness: a magpie's eye for the glinting fragment, the accidental beauty, the small detail that transforms the whole. Their paintings feel as if they've been built piece by piece, like dry stone walls, imperfect but enduring, with the occasional modernist brick nudged into place. These are artists who aren't afraid to show the seams, to let the construction show, and to allow fragility to sit alongside intention. The story their work tells isn't linear or complete - but neither were those books that first opened our eyes.”
Laura Bygrave and Alex Crocker