Twofold Quintet
5 artists' works

Twofold Quintet was an exhibition of five books and five wall pieces by five AMBruno artists: Judy Goldhill, Philip Lee, Sophie Loss, John McDowall, and Cally Trench. The exhibition took place at the Courtyard Gallery, Ballroom Arts, Aldeburgh, 1st-3rd November 2024. Philip Lee's performance Trochromatic Painting 1 November occurred during the private view.

This was a concise and light exhibition to celebrate creativity and friendship. The display consisted of one book and one other work by each of the five artists, so locating their book works in the context of their wider artistic practice: photography, performance, paper composition, reading, and drawing.

These varied mediums are utilised by each artist as the appropriate means of materialising, and sharing, their ideas - and the book is one form that all five work with regularly. In contrast to wall works, books are experienced when held, this is an intimate and haptic moment, and in this display a reading between the two is proposed. There is a creative journey from the work on the wall to the making of a book, or vice-versa.

It has been a true pleasure selecting the pieces in the show, and having fascinating conversations with my fellow artists.

Sophie Loss

My practice over 50 years incorporates lens-based media and book works, exploring movement, stillness and repetition. Deliquesce, inspired by the final days of my mother's 95 years, captures the moment where she was disappearing, that space of life/not life.

The process of mourning is a recurring theme, in this instance work centred around matters elemental, where I have made visible the experience of mortal illness and the composition of the earth itself. The imprint of time permeates this work, exemplified by the shifting, wind ravaged sands captured here on the edge of the Namib Desert.

Judy Goldhill

My essential medium is my body. Live performance is central to my work. My body has been covered with clay and pigments, transforming it into something between human and object, both anonymous and universal. I also enact performances in prints, photographs, films, books and ceramic sculpture, working in galleries, in street interventions, and for camera. My artist's books animate my body.

Telamones, or male caryatids, are figures used as pillars to support a structure. In the Forum Baths tepidarium in Pompeii, the burly statues are at intervals along the side of the space. Between Telamones offers a reconstruction of part of the tepidarium. The images are based on a photograph of myself performing as Telamon, one of Jason's Argonauts.

Philip Lee

My paper compositions are hybrid paradoxical images of and on paper, a play for the eye to connect to, giving shape to thoughts of uncertain origins. They counter the inceptive flatness of paper and offer the way to under, over, and behind. I use multiple imperfect images to create a new perfect one.

I recognise my ideas in the slippage of words/language, in synchronicity, in shadows, holes, damaged surfaces, incongruity, and in the artifice of: Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr, Brecht's fourth wall, Carlo Crivelli's painting of a foot, trompe-l'oeil, Andrea Mantegna, a cappella, damaged photos, Alice Through the Looking Glass, E. T. A. Hoffmann, ha-ha, bas-relief drawings, Zeuxis, and mise en abyme.

Sophie Loss

Here is a material, chronological trace of reading, going from book to book, forming a constellation of intertextual relation. Just one possible array, and as such a model of the mutable associations of reading, within the book and between all books, that are also that of the library.

In Ellipsis the elided major part of the words of Heinrich Böll's short story, Murke's Collected Silences, do not form a lacuna in the place between end and beginning, but are notionally somewhere in the space of time outside of the book's cover as the text leads out, around and back.

John McDowall