Archipelago

Archipelago brings together a body of sculpture, assemblage and collage the artist has developed over the last four years. Found materials and travel are central to Tom’s practice with the materials in the works accumulated from journeys around the Atlantic Archipelago: from Ireland, Scotland, Northumberland, Cumbria and Derbyshire to Norfolk, Sussex, Kent, Cornwall and London.
 
The exhibition is a project of world-building.  Works are conglomerated together to imagine the artefacts of a speculative culture inhabiting an uncertain world. A world full of strange, dislocated symbols and complicated, contradictory materials alongside objects and things of tangled meaning, all within a precarious changing environment. It draws energy from a trio of works of speculative fiction: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, Angela Carter’s Heroes & Villains and Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker.

The works in Archipelago may be maps, way-markers, relics or offerings.
 
The show is accompanied by the launch of a publication of the same name, consisting of a long form piece of prose and poetry that expands on the world within Archipelago and a new variable cyanotype edition developed for the exhibition.