Scrumptious -Ruth Dupré & Anna Barlow, with a film by Joe Morgan.
Saturday July 4th - Sunday July 26th
open daily 2-6PM from Saturday July 4th to Sunday July 12th, & by appointment.
A joint show about food, in video, glass, ceramic, and painting.
The show features new gastronomic oil paintings, a façade installation, glass work, and a rabbit by Ruth, ceramic food by Anna in combination with Joe’s 10 minute film made with Anna Mirror Mirror.
Joe says of his film “Our characters inhabit this restricted, uptight and censored world, but there are these intense anxieties and tensions, this turbulence below the surface. As a companion piece to Anna’s sculptures, I wanted to create something that felt immediate and spikey, beautiful and horrifying, a battle cry against our homogenised ultra-processed world. I wanted to see what would happen if you fused The Great British Bake Off with Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist …. I think we get a little taste of that in the film…”
Ruth Dupre: Eclaire’s Delights
In the summer of 1888, Paul Gauguin witnessed an extraordinary outpouring of creativity in the South of France. His friend Vincent Van Gogh made, day after day after day, a group of paintings of sunflowers, the likes of which the world had never before seen. ‘You have made sunflowers your own’ Gauguin told his friend, awe-struck.
Something similar could be said of this group of paintings of food by Ruth Dupre. As with Van Gogh’s sunflowers, these paintings were created compulsively, impulsively, and at a scarcely credible spread. It was as if they had to emerge, now, in this moment.
Food is both a solace to the needy, and an extravagant fantasy. We love it. We gorge on it. We simply cannot get enough of its beauty. Here we see, laid out for our delectation, strawberries heaped high, ice cream oozing, pineapple slices that make us slather. They are bright, brashly colourful and overwhelmingly edible to the eye. You can gorge on them too, for just as long as it takes.
Written by Michael Glover
Statement by Anna Barlow
For the past twenty years, I have pursued the idea of “visual edibility.” When food is evoked in any way, it triggers an immediate physical response - one of either desire or repulsion. It is this reflex that I am drawn to explore and manipulate. To provoke a reaction in the viewer, whether welcome or not, is both instant and visceral.
I am interested in the rituals surrounding indulgence and celebration — how food is assembled, displayed, and consumed, and the stories it carries of people and place. Melting ice cream, collapsing surfaces, and oozing textures speak to something fleeting and often overlooked. Using clay, porcelain, and glaze, I preserve these transient moments, fixing them in time. My process is rooted in the materials themselves; clay, porcelain, and glaze offer rich possibilities, lending themselves naturally to the language of food.
Ice cream serves as a central motif: nostalgic, sensory, and ephemeral. It exists in a state of continual transformation, evoking both memory and desire while resisting permanence.
Beneath the decorative surfaces of sweet foods lies a more complex narrative. Celebration is intertwined with performance, consumption, and restraint. My work draws attention to these tensions, where pleasure and discomfort coexist — held together in sugar, ritual, and form.
uth Dupré has worked in several different materials, predominantly clay, glass, paint and film, and exhibited in numerous high profile galleries including the Whitechapel, the Barbican, the Royal Academy, the ICA, and the V & A in London.
She won the Jack Goldhill Prize at the Royal Academy for her glass piece Butchery, and the Bombay Sapphire Prize, for a film she made with Anne Brodie and Louise Gilbert Scott. Her work is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery and the Corning Museum of Glass, New York.