2 September – 3 October 2009
James Birch‘s small collages made from the perverse couplings of images plucked from the pages of early arts and science publications are reminiscent of characters from a macabre masque. His day job is in theatre and intentionally or not, these works can be seen as ‘theatrical’.
Born in Australia, with parents from the United Kingdom, European and other histories have long held a fascination for James. He mines second hand bookshops seeking the forgotten and discarded to transform into something extraordinary. The images he creates allude to the extreme and to the darker side of humanity.
The hybrid figures in his ‘gallery of worthies’ are made up from portraits of personages from literature and history sourced in an early Wallace Collection art history catalogue, combined with masks from chemical warfare paraphernalia publications and body parts from natural history periodicals wearing costumes that appear as much Vivienne Westwood as West End after James Birch’s subversive cutting, colouring and pasting.
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