OCTOBER/NOVEMBER | CURATED GROUP SHOW | The Blind Leading the Seers

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER | GROUP SHOW | THE BLIND LEADING THE SEERS

A group exhibition curated by Charlie Caldecott
Featuring Sarah Pager, Louisa Mahony, Jo Casling, Dougal Kirkland, Emma Coop, Helen Goodwin, Rachel Bird, Amy Rosenthal, Rose Arbuthnott, Michael Bury and Andrew Boyd.

6 October - 8 November

The Blind Leading the Seers brings together nine artists whose work responds to a poem written by curator Charlie Caldecott.

The exhibition began with a story about an abstract painter in Dorset who worked outdoors at night, using black paint, straw and the surrounding landscape, allowing touch, instinct and the physical act of making to guide the work rather than sight alone. This approach inspired Caldecott’s poem, which imagines “the blind” leading “the seers” across a dark moor, where familiar ways of seeing and understanding begin to dissolve.

Rather than illustrating the poem literally, Sarah Pager, Louisa Mahony, Jo Casling, Dougal Kirkland, Emma Coop, Helen Goodwin, Rachel Bird, Amy Rosenthal, Rose Arbuthnott, Michael Bury and Andrew Boyd each interpret its ideas through their own distinctive practice. Together, their works explore darkness, landscape, material, instinct and the limits of perception.

The exhibition asks what might emerge when knowledge and certainty are set aside. Can we encounter a landscape through memory, movement, texture or imagination? Can losing sight of the familiar allow us to see differently?

The Blind Leading the Seers invites audiences into a shifting, sensory landscape where the unknown becomes a creative space and where those assumed to be without sight may ultimately be the ones who lead the way.

 

The Blind leading the Seers by Charlie Caldecott

The blind stumble onto the moor

The seers follow them with lights aglore

They point out shapes

They’ve seen before

but realise fast

This is not a room with a door

But a place in the dark,

not a park

An old venue, not simply a view

A place with edges not hedges

The blind don’t need guides here,

they are no longer black-blind

Colours appear in their brain

Muddy browns, russets and straw yellows

Stamped down by workboots

Down to the shoots

Absorbed into the corporeal

By feel

The seers paint, talk and draw in the day

The blind simply lead the way

Along the track, through the field, amongst the trees

Along the lees, up the bank, onto the moor

They have needed no helpYelp! Yelp! Goes the dog as he jumps the log

The seers did not need to see

All their talking and knowledge

All those fees through college

The blind circle round

Their lights are blown out

A murmur of assent

As the night enfolds every sense.