This website has two purposes. One is to archive what proved to be a highly successful and diverse presentation of the work of close to 40 artists and their associates.  The other is to create a focal point for the development of a series of even more varied and ambitious exhibitions, focused on the theme.  

 

Love & Death was conceived as a happy and sad, amusing and serious, reassuring and disturbing encounter with two of the most important themes of all.  It was held in and around Walcot Chapel, in Bath, south-west England, as part of the FaB15 festival of visual arts, between May 23 and June 6, 2015.

 

There is no particular model for subsequent Love & Death projects. In fact it would be ideal if we could create a series of quite distinctive exhibitions and events, influenced by such factors as the interests and obsessions of the artists involved, the character of the surrounding area (both physically and culturally) and the mood created by specific venues. Certainly Walcot Chapel was very important in unifying the exhibition and events, and adding its distinctive flavour. 

 

I am very interested in developing close collaborations with other curators and institutions. One of the key reasons for the success in Bath was the way most of us involved embraced the possibilities of meeting and talking together - not with a particular goal but as a way to explore shared interests and concerns and to discuss those particular elements that drew us to to the theme. For me, through this process, Love & Death became a series of quite intimate conversations, among ourselves as participants, which then extended out to the public, through the work and through personal encounters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For years now Walcot Chapel has cocooned all kinds of imaginative expression within its welcoming white space, filled with light from three graceful, round-arched windows. This year FaB's founding director Arran Hodgson and I, as an artist-curator. decided that we'd like to give the chapel itself some direct attention, presenting an opportunity to  

re-establish the venue's own special identity.

 

It was built, close to 200 years ago, as a burial chapel for St Swithin's, Bath's main parish church, which looms over it still. And it continues to be encircled by the graves of a few hundred of the many thousands of people who were once buried there. So Death became the most natural of themes, and Love was introduced to balance the mood of loss and grief - a balance we often seek when we remember the dead.

 

The twin themes inspired artists to submit work to this exhibition that displayed a marvellously eclectic range of responses: poignant, reflective, provocative, challenging and even funny. Yet all of the pieces on show, and the performance and events that accompanied them, seemed to fuse together two extremes, of intense affection

and intense suffering. 

 

In Love & Death @ Walcot Chapel the air was filled with the sights and sounds of ritual, regret, melancholy, yearning and defiance, with the essential sprinkling of humour. 

Through installation, painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, video, stained glass and physical and musical performance more than 30 artists (plus their associates) contributed to this rich encounter with the most urgently desired and the most deeply feared of all our shared experiences.