Wayne Burrows

Fun afternoon yesterday with @marhashem taking in the final hours of Persona, a 40 artist show themed around masks, staged in a labyrinthine crypt beneath a church on the Euston Road, and The Coming Of Age at Wellcome Collection, a show about attitudes to ageing featuring some excellent ceramic works by Serena Korda, an untitled triptych by Makoto Toya and some bits and pieces from a Japanese restaurant project that was set up to be staffed entirely by people with dementia among many other things. Persona closed yesterday evening, but the Wellcome show runs until November 29th.

Reposts of previously posted then deleted & slightly modified images finalised before leaving for London earlier this month, under the titles Immersion XXXIII (Geckos) [1978] and Immersion XXXV (Underworld Oracle) [1978]. The full 40 image Immersions series is now catalogued online, fictionally spanning the years between 1970 and 1980, but fairly likely to be added to on an ongoing basis - the first Immersions were made pretty much at the beginning of the Holcombe project, featuring in exhibitions held in Nottingham & London during 2012 and 2013, and the series has been sporadically added to ever since with five new images attached to the series so far in 2026 alone.

Asymmetries Notebook (c.1978 – 1982) was made in 2014 and contains 31 paired images (not including the cover) with the reverse sides of the pages left blank. Some years later, after gathering suitable materials piecemeal, a second series of 31 paired images were made on boards, outside the notebook itself, having something of the feel of Victorian stereoscopic slides, but with the intention that these would be inserted into the notebook’s blank pages should some hypothetical future published version of the full series ever become a possibility. The 62 internal pairs, plus the paired front and reverse cover images, make a total of 126 individual plates, each designed to always be seen beside its partner image. While the making of Asymmetries seems to have been mainly a formal exercise, or at least an excursion into free play with the limited range of suitable materials available, and is perhaps best seen as a series of variations and improvisations, it has been suggested that the consistent portrait format means it might also work as a set of ‘SNAP’ cards (126 of them, so slightly more challenging than average) – another form that Asymmetries could be realised into at some future date. Interestingly, the series was prefigured by one of the earliest works in the Holcombe timeline, a paired diptych in The Modernists series known as The Modern Interior I & The Modern interior II, dating from around 1967 or 1968, but actually made in 2010 or 2011. Anyway, good to get these completed & catalogued ready for tomorrow's departure for London & Plymouth, where I'll then be until around May 14th.

Diptych: The Winter Palace / The Summer Palace (c.1979) - probably to be added as further instalments in the Collectivism series, which also incorporates a large scale Apocalyptic Landscape and four scenes of reenacted revolution and folkloric ritual. Currently setting about cataloguing each of the Holcombe portfolios and sequenced images (and a few other commissioned non-Holcombe collage series works that may or may not be strictly 'his') in order to figure out how extensive this entirely fictional body of work actually is, 15 years into the project of making it. So I have been gradually listing each individual series and its contents to create a larger kind of faked art historical resource online, and perhaps it might even make it into print as a Holcombe monograph at some future point if that possibility arises. This will all end up taking a fair while to complete, I guess, but it's a job that has needed doing for years and it *is* finally getting underway.

Slightly bedraggled (but not to be defeated by the rain & hail) cherry blossom viewing earlier this afternoon - with Rachel Jacobs & the Future Machine (aka @ritualsforwhenthefuturecomes ), lots of cherry blossom cake & a select gathering of people mad enough to assume the event would still be going ahead despite the weather (which naturally just began to clear up as things wound down for the day). All the weather issues seemed kind of appropriate, as the ongoing project (set to manifest at fixed times of year in 4 or 5 fixed locations annually until 2050) is mainly about climate change anyway.

Been cataloguing & refining the Master Painters of Britain series, begun back in 2013 or thereabouts, which seems to have settled for now at around 125 plates, all built on reproductions of works by British artists published between 1905 and 1915. All are titled after the works that form their base images, as modified by Holcombe in a few distinct bursts of activity between the early 1960s and later 1970s / very early 1980s. These are a few random ones, most of them culled (if I remember rightly) from a 1905 special issue of The Studio commemorating the 100th anniversary of The Old Water-Colour Society, as completed or slightly modified from earlier versions during the past few days (hence these photos being conveniently on hand): 1: The Poisoned Cup by G. Cattermole 2: Middlesex Pastures by Robert Little 3: La Casa Marina Foliera, Venice by W. Callow 4: Ploughing by David Murray R.A. 5: Spring Time by P.J. Nattel 6: The Rainbow Lies In The Curve Of The Sand by J.R. Weguelin 7: A Hay Field Near The Mendips by R. Thorne Waite 8: Cromarty From The East by Robert W. Allan 9: Young Anglers by Birket Foster

Folklore Series: New Scottish Architecture (Monument To Commemorate Scotland's Independence [Location Unknown], c.1979)

Folklore Series: A Landscape With Ghosts (1976)

Model Village (Gecko Baroque) [c1980], as more or less completed before heading back from the studio this evening. Goes fairly light on the actual geckos, but managed to get a few in there despite the background turning out not entirely suited to what I more generally had in mind for them (rest assured, there are plenty of others to add to further, more gecko centric, images later).The dolls kind of took their place in this one, though I'm not sure if they wind up readng as a bit unsettling (Svankmajer style) or just fully & unapologetically kitsch (like they've been lifted from some imaginary stop-motion animated Bridgerton episode). Then again, kitsch and unsettling are equally fine by me, most of the time, so whichever one of those this image reads as will do perfectly well for now. The architecture, incidentally (& for no special reason) is a mash up of features from London, the Kremlin, Windsor, Devon and a few other random English towns.

First day back in the studio and I think this 122 × 125cm monster of an image is now finished, albeit as yet undecided on a title - 'Apocalyptic Landscape' is what it's been labelled so far but it may (or may not) aquire a better one later. It might also find itself positioned in the Collectivism series, despite being on a different scale and in a divergent format to the other four (so far), but that isn't final just yet. It could (if the framing ever becomes affordable and the exhibition possibility likely) make for a strong centrepiece or keystone in a room featuring them all, anyway, so given that this wasn't really the starting intention that turns out to be a nice surprise. Good to be back in the studio for a while now at least ... hopefully some interesting things will get made and written in here before I go away again towards the end of April.

Plymouth (almost double) rainbow encountered after returning from a bracing walk along the coastal path between Bantham & Thurlestone beaches a bit further down the South Devon coast. For once it managed not to rain while we were on the actual beaches & cliffs.. Nice to get a bit of cold but relatively dry air and windy sea in on the last full day I've got down here, before starting the (very) long coach trip back towards Notts late tomorrow afternoon anyway, though there were - despite the warning sign promises - no sightings of any actual adders to be had.

Afternoon avoiding the wind & rain with a wander around the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth, with lots of old favourites present & correct but the sadly conspicuous absence of their usual Common Octopus, who it seems passed away of old age fairly recently (though given that the Common Octopus normally lives for only 1 or 2 years at most in the wild, and it's probably 3 or 4 years since I first saw that particular specimen, it clearly did pretty well by Common Octopus lifespan standards). The place was fascinating as usual, anyway, and the gift shop managed to sell me an irresistible octopus keyring on the way out, so beware if you do end up in there one of these days - that place has a lot of covetable sea creature themed merchandise, most of which raises money towards the NMA's various conservation and ocean preservation projects.