Overview
British artist Tom Lovelace works at the intersection of photography, sculpture and performance to create multi-layered, site-specific installations. In this solo exhibition at Flowers Gallery, Lovelace presents a new body of work focusing on conceptual ideas of ‘theatre’, to explore spaces and encounters where the real, imagined and performed converge and intertwine.
Interval brings together several of Lovelace’s most recent Assembly Works, an ongoing series of assemblages centred around photography and, significantly, involving elements of bodily intervention. The exhibition discreetly explores the interstices of the gallery, working inbetween the hidden and public aspects of its internal architecture. Influenced by Poor Theatre, a concept defined by Polish Director Jerzy Grotowski, which was characterized by a minimal use of staging and props, Lovelace creates uncommon objects, images and experiences from mundane and commonplace materials, using utilitarian fabrics found in public spaces, workshop off-cuts and industrial apparatus.
Structures built into the interior of the gallery appear within the photographs, uniting the image with its surrounding architecture and blurring the boundaries between the ephemeral and the permanent, the imagined and the real. Using drapery, false floors and jib (secret) doors as theatrical mechanisms to conceal and reveal, Lovelace invites the viewer to move between the edges and the centre of the action, generating a sense of theatre within the everyday.