BARRY THOMPSON
'Believe in me as I believe in you'
7 November - 20 December 2008
In his first solo exhibition outside the UK, emerging British artist Barry Thompson (b. 1974) welcomes you to Norman’s world:
“Its 6 am, and the dawn chorus of Dylan, Hendrix and Floyd ignites our senses, camouflaged up to the hilt with dry grass and burnt corked faces we advance into the blue morning shadows of wilderness one hundred yards from the nearest estate where the low early light bounces off the corrugated garage roofs and sharpens my gaze. We must make it to the river. This is no man’s land, and this could be Flanders, and the stakes are high, its 1916 and I have not eaten for two days or eight hours, I can’t remember…..”
In Barry’s, or Norman’s, exquisitely drawn and detailed drawings of birds, suburban parkland, burnt-out car wreckage, rockers screaming down microphones, and men in World War I trenches there is a deep pathos as well as wry and self-aware humour; but above all there is a profound sense of the hope, joy and beauty that can be found in suburban existence. The subject matter are memories from Barry’s, and Norman’s, youth spent (or misspent) bird-watching with his father, playing soldier in the scrubland near his home with his friends, and coming home at dawn after spending the night in a club watching a rock band.
Time has been laboured over each of these miniature drawings: this series of fifteen works on paper took over a year and a half to painstakingly complete. Each individual drawing becomes a single testimony to the power that small, overlooked and modest things can command: a single stinging nettle, a patch of shrubland, a common garden butterfly, a Blue Tit. Titles are lifted from the lines of rock songs, or from the artist’s own writing and poetry that combine autobiographical referencing with the pathos of song lyrics and moments of profound reflection.
Who is Norman? He is certainly not a knowing artistic ploy or grand gesture but something far more internal and resonant to Barry:
“Norman is essentially me in every way except that he never attended art school but instead left school at the age of 16 to take on an apprenticeship at Ford’s production line at the plant in Dagenham where I was born and grew up. When Norman was made redundant in the year 2000 he had a nervous breakdown and his relationship broke down. He now lives with his mum, works part time due to his nervous disposition and spends most of his time walking in the nearby greenbelt land next to his parents’ home which he inhabited as a child regularly. When he is not out watching birds he makes drawings and writes bad poetry.”
Fact and fiction, image and text, are not opposites, but versions of the truth, and there is no need to take sides. All that is required of the viewer is to take in and remember the romanticism, the keenly felt emotion, of life on the periphery.
Barry Thompson (b. 1974) lives and works in London, UK having completed an MA at the Royal College of Art, London (2003-2005). Previous exhibitions include two solo shows with Rachmaninoff’s, London (2006 & 2007), and group exhibitions include ‘Hope and Despair’, Cell Project Space, London (2007); ‘Salon Nouveau’, engholm engholm galerie, Vienna (2007); ‘For Peel’, No More Grey Gallery, London (2006); ‘Into the Light of Things’, Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham (2006); ‘Jerusalem’, Dean Clough Gallery, Halifax, UK.