Fliss Cary and Tracee Findlater installation at The Halesworth Gallery
Established in 1966, The Halesworth Gallery has run as a charitable trust, with a changing committee of artists, teachers, writers, makers and retired academics, all volunteers, who programme exhibitions by local artists for a season that runs between May and September. The gallery is on the first floor of a row of 17th century Almshouses. Access is tight, via a tiny spiral staircase that is not for the fainted hearted (or anyone with restricted mobility). An unheated space, it is an architectural gem, divided into three sections by a series of back-to-back fireplaces. The gallery used to compliment Halesworth's lending library, which was housed on the ground floor, until it moved to a purpose-built development on the end of the high street. The building’s history as a repository for books is appropriate to the beautiful book art Fliss and Tracee have presented here, now.
Installation view looking the down length of the Halesworth Gallery
Fliss and Tracee met at an artist’s workshop held at Groundwork Gallery, King's Lynn. Something Grim has been the outcome of that collaboration. Fliss learnt how to bind her concertina books from the bookbinder, author, and publisher Judith Ellis. Judith has become known for creating concertina books in her workshops. She uses the format as a teaching aid for her students making the simplest of bindings. Each book has front and back covers and several pages that support it, to display the book's content when extended.
Fliss has taken the format to create a long series of black and white renderings of crows in flurries against a brooding sky. She uses printmaking, charcoal or pen and ink drawings to respond to the landscape she is familiar with around her district on the perimeter of Norwich. Hedgerows attract her attention, being both barriers as well as homes to small creatures and birds. Hostile and yet sheltering, manmade and yet prone to growing into wild thickets or trees.
Installation view of Something Grim by Fliss Caryy and Tracee Findlater
Tracee's poetry is about the natural environment as well as our internal responses and thoughts toward nature in terms of dreamscape, and marginal 'wild' spaces. Her poetry has been published in Cape Magazine, Black Bough Poetry and Wildfire Words. Her first pamphlet Broken Passages was published in 2023.
About the author
Paul Barratt
Paul Barratt started working in contemporary art galleries in 1989, having graduated in Fine Art from Goldmsith’s, London University. He initially worked at Anthony d’Offay Gallery, one of the contemporary art dealers, who dominated the London art market in the 80s and 90s. He was approached by the Lisson Gallery to be gallery manager for the influential art dealer Nicholas Logsdail. This was followed by a short period in New York at Gladstone Gallery, to work for visionary art dealer Barbara Gladstone, working with the artist and filmmaker Matthew Barney.
On his return to London, Paul secured a place on the postgraduate curatorial course at the Royal College of Art, to complete an MA. After graduation in 2001, he worked as an independent curator on several projects in Oslo, London, Brighton and Basel, before joining Paul Vater at his design agency Sugarfree in 2004. He has worked with Paul ever since.
