Says it all on the tin 🥫
Please donate if you can, I would love to run the half but I need the extra motivation!
The funds we are trying to raise won't just go towards putting on an exhibition, but also running a programme of community focused events and workshops.
What matters to us is being able to put on a show which gives back double we are asking for in donations, through putting our energy, hope, and creativity out into the world at a time when it is sorely needed.
🏃🏼♂️ to the link in bio & donate if you feel able to
Tess Foley, Crystal Garden — Untitled (Ble.), 2025, Silver Gelatine Print, 12 x 15cm
Last one of the day. And this time an excerpt from the last book to make it off of my bedside stack: Karl Ove Knausgaard's beguiling autobiography, A Death In The Family.
'And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of colour across the sky - so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.'
Tess Foley, Crystal Garden — Untitled (Shk.), 2025, Silver Gelatine Print, 12 x 15cm
And another one!
+ The opening lines of one of my personal favs, Jon Fosse's breathless and beautiful Septology
'And I see myself standing and looking at the picture with the two lines that cross in the middle, one purple line, one brown line, it’s a painting wider than it is high and I see that I’ve painted the lines slowly, the paint is thick, two long wide lines, and they’ve dripped, where the brown line and purple line cross the colours blend beautifully and drip and I’m thinking this isn’t a picture but suddenly the picture is the way it’s supposed to be, it’s done, there’s nothing more to do on it, I think, it’s time to put it away, I don’t want to stand here at the easel any more, I don’t want to look at it any more, I think, and I think today’s Monday and I think...'
Ellipsis mine. With no full stops, Septology isn't so easy to cut into!
Tess Foley, Crystal Garden — Untitled (Ohr.) III, 2025, Silver Gelatine Print, 12 x 15cm
Sharing more from my ongoing body of work, Crystal Garden
Alongside an excerpt from David Whyte’s poem, What to Remember When Waking.
You are not
a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not
an accident
amidst other accidents
you were invited
from another and greater
night
than the one
from which
you have just emerged.
For anyone who struggles over the winter, I recommend the audiobook (by the same name), which has been an especially affirming listen over the past few dreary weeks of weather and light!
untitled (Goethite), 2026, hand printed silver gelatine print, 12 x 15 cm, rusted steel frame, 44 x 55 cm
Excited but also a little nervous to share the work I have been making recently under the title Crystal Garden 🪴
It’s a work in progress, and quite a personal project that I am still coming to terms with the meaning of myself.
For now, as I don’t have the words to support the work yet, I will use each post to share a passage from one of the books that has shaped this as yet unwritten story.
Soft boy alert ‼️🚨 this one’s from Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus:
‘And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes —how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know.’
Big ole thanks to everyone who came to our stall at GLUE! We couldn’t have asked for a better or busier weekend. So many lovely interactions while people put together their books! It made all of the effort that went into this well worth it 🫶
Here are some scans from the books that were made at the ICA over the weekend 👆
And a massive thanks once again too to all of the artists who submitted ❤️ The variety and quality of images was what made the stall work and what got people excited, which was amazing to be a part of!
Finally thanks to Dan for being the best collaborator and an all round great person to spend a weekend yapping with! He is publishing his first book under his own imprint @nuclearsoupstudios very soon, so keep your eyes peeled…
Installation shot for Za Cherni Dni as a part of CONSTELLATIONS group exhibition
The exhibition is open @ Fblock / Bower Ashton until the 3rd so check it out if you are in that end of town!
Shame to have missed the opening last night as I was heading off in my #researchtrip (slide 2) More on that soon…
This Monday I will be hanging my work in F-Block as a part of @alejandroacin_ ‘s Live Brief! In the meantime, I wanted to share pages from a small publication I made to sit alongside the installation.
Read more about it below if ya like:
Za Cherni Dni roughly translates to ‘for black days’. It depicts the sentiment of combating unsettled periods of life, both personal and political. It might seem like a stark contrast to the joyful spirit of these images, but within this phrase and this installation, the emphasis is on what you do ‘for’ the black days. Rather than describing the context of the darkness, the images visualise an approach to coping with it.
The work is drawn from two archives. I brought together my own body of work, and that of the photographer Panayot Burnev. Both myself and Burnev are young adults navigating the same city of Sofia in a youthful haze, and finding similar compositions mirrored 70 years apart.
Parallels exist beyond the superficial appearances. Prior to the six month period I lived in Bulgaria, the country grappled with life and death under the strain of the covid pandemic. Once the restrictions had passed but the uncertainty remained, I found myself in the midst of an explosion of energy.
I cannot say for sure what Burnev felt about his circumstances, but I can be certain that his life in the 1950s & 60s was not far removed from uncertainty. Under the rule of the Bulgarian Communist Party, this period of the country’s history was pockmarked with atrocities. Despite these dark clouds, Burnev’s photographs capture the light.
These archives reflect a universally appreciable essence of youth. A pent up and frustrated joy. Only, with the added gravity of the surrounding socio-political contexts. This exhibition is about doing justice to both that specificity and that universality.
What do you do with the wild abundance of energy and joy that you experience in youth if it is not the time to be expressing it outwardly, in society? Where does it go, how does it burn out? I think that this is something that can only be answered for in experiences. Which is why it is important that these archives exist, replete with experience.
