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THE MINIATURES CHALLENGE
13 November – 1 December 2024
On 17 September, we launched The Miniatures Challenge — an open call inviting artists to explore the power of the small. Nearly 600 entries arrived, from all over the UK and beyond. Judges Zarina Muhammad (The White Pube), Gareth Cadwallader, and Anne Ryan selected a final 60 works to be exhibited.
“It was all very well to say 'Drink me,' but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry.”
But Alice did drink — and was telescoped, made small enough to enter Wonderland. Miniaturisation gives us access. When the familiar becomes small, it becomes strange again — transformed, compelling, an invitation to wonder.
People have long been drawn to the miniature. From the luminous Mughal portraits of India, to limned manuscript paintings in Mediaeval Europe, these tiny images were once as magical as photography is mundane today. A miniature portrait could be carried in a pocket, fished out like a relic. Now we carry endless images in our pockets — but they don’t stop us in our tracks.
Miniatures still do.
When a painting or sculpture fits in your palm, you lean in. You pause. You see. The scale forces attention, invites reverence, draws you into a more intimate gaze. In that moment, the miniature transforms: it becomes more than a small version of something bigger. It becomes a portal.
All art condenses mystery into matter — tries to trap truth in form. Miniatures do this with peculiar force. Because they can be held, they feel possessable. Like a talisman. A sacred object, humming with something larger than itself.
But their magic isn’t just in what they give — it’s in what they withhold. Like Wonderland, they remain partly unknowable. Their smallness draws us closer, but never quite lets us inside.
“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
In this show, the answer might be:
5 inches wide. 5 inches deep. Yours to hold — but never entirely yours to know.
WORLD'S STILL ON A WIRE
Curated by Scott McCracken
26th September – 6th October 2024
Worlds Still on a Wire is a continuation of and a return to a previous exhibition titled Worlds on a Wire in 2022. The title is a variation on Rainer Werner Fassbender’s 1973 television serial World on a Wire (Welt am Draht), itself an adaptation of Daniel F. Galouye’s novel Simulacron-3. A world on a wire is a precarious situation. The image of some mass entity hanging there, swinging and spinning suspended only by a single wire, acts as a metaphor for the way artists engage with making.
Being aboard a boat feels precarious in its own way; there is the potential to move off in any direction, but also of slowly sinking, of how comfortable and known it feels to be on firm ground.
Art relies on a sort of accepted artificiality. What we see is not really what we see – we are looking at a construction. But it is not simply about world-building, it is also about a world-unbuilding. A taking apart and a reassembling where parts don’t fit so neatly together, where the absurd and the quotidian, the diurnal and the nocturnal, the telescopic and the microscopic, can sit together in a kind of unifying tension. An unworlding. Paintings and sculptures have their own inherent ‘supernaturality’. A process of transformation happens in the making of the work. It never fully becomes the thing it claims or attempts to picture or show. Nor does it simply remain as material and matter. Something else is happening. A continual becoming.
The protagonist in Philip K Dick’s novel Time Out of Joint, Ragle Gumm, has a strange experience when he misremembers the light cord in his own bathroom:
“Why did I remember a light cord? he asked himself. A specific cord, hanging a specific distance down, at a specific place. I wasn’t groping around randomly. As I would in a strange bathroom. I was hunting for a light cord I had pulled many times.”
The light cord described above is itself a wire - perhaps not too dissimilar to the wires hanging in the gallery that are attached to the works - serves as a reminder of the difference between illumination and darkness, between an inside and an outside. Or more accurately between an inside and another inside.
“Artworks are insides,” Phil Ford.
SKEUOMORPH
For 'Skeuomorph' Canal Boat Contemporary headed to dry land, temporarily mooring in the Greatorex Street Gallery in Whitechapel, in order to show larger works.
Curated by Pushka and Dido Hallett.
26th June - 2nd July
SKEUOMORPH - a derivative object that takes design queues from an earlier design. In a painting context this means works making specific nods to art history and the associated values of that time.
THE CANAL BOAT ART FAIR
In October 2023 six artists living aboard canal boats put on a show on their boats on the Regents Canal by Broadway Market.
Each artist curated their boat around the theme 'Moored together'.
Over the weekend we had over 300 visitors, and the gallery was born.