Image: ready or not
Making sense of the world around us is a central part of our being. From the earliest thoughts, through our journey into life, we define ourselves with respect to our understanding and knowledge, the people we know and love and events which have shaped our lives. 'Secrets and Shadows' is a show featuring the works of a collection of 13 artists, each on a voyage of discovery. Common themes are the disquiet we all feel when confronted by situations outside the familiar, the ripples that flow from unexpected events or revelations, the de-stabilisation that a new perspective can wreck on the old, safe and familiar.
The discovery of the new can be a two-edged sword in that it can create possibilities for the future but could also initiate change that forces us to question our perspective of the past. In small ways this is a positive process of learning and renewal, but the impact of the new can cause larger more seismic shifts in our awareness. These changes can uncover secrets hidden or repressed by our subconscious and shed light on the darker recesses of our psyches. They can cause us to re-evaluate our lives and our priorities, to question our relationships and motivations.
In this show, each artist has used his or her journey to acquire self knowledge and imbue their work with the spiritual, emotional, intellectual passion which accompanies development and the quest for meaning. These works are the product of those journeys, drawn together as a collective expression of the things sitting just outside our fields of view in the Secrets and Shadows of our lives.
CAPTIONS:
Top: 'Ready or not, here I come...'
Below: 'Into the deep dark night'
and 'I didn't mean to do it'
Collage and oil paint on wood, £400 each
Image: Deep dark night
Image: "i didn't mean to do it." mixed media on board
Art Exhibition and book launch
Private View and author reading: Tuesday 13th May
At Foyles Gallery
2nd floor, Foyles Book Shop
113-119 Charring Cross Road
London WC2
This show was organised and curated by Caitlin Smail. It was held in conjunction with the paperback launch of 'Thirteen', the new novel by Sebastian Beaumont.
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Stephen Bardot is a taxi driver working the night shift in Brighton. He works such long shifts that he is often driving while exhausted and it is then that he starts to experience major alterations to his perception of reality. People start to take lifts in his cab who know things they shouldn’t, and who ultimately may not even be real.
As time passes, the world gets weirder. People appear and disappear who know far too much about Stephen and his past, and who lure him further and further into the twilight world of ‘Thirteen’. But if he asks questions, he gets hurt. Ultimately, he decides, for the sake of both his safety and his sanity, he must walk away.
But Thirteen has no intention of letting him go…
• Praise for Thirteen:
“My discovery of the year by some considerable distance.” Scott Pack in The Bookseller
“Readers may find themselves sharing Stephen's compulsion to take this scary journey and unable to put Beaumont's novel down.” The Guardian
Beaumont “combines a vast experience of human nature with intelligence and imagination.” The Times
“An always stimulating and entertaining mix of comedy, pathos and the macabre.” Francis King.
Sebastian Beaumont was born and raised in Scotland. He graduated from Manchester Metropolitan University with a degree in Creative Arts, in which he majored in Creative Writing. He now lives in Brighton where he works in private practice as a psychotherapeutic counsellor. He received an Arts Council Bursary to write Thirteen.
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