Hair – that indexical equivalent of the devilishly chameleonic David Bowie – offers up numerous tributaries of signification. It can stress and deconstruct tropes of femininity and masculinity whilst celebrating the two in their fusion; it possesses its own libidinal energy that can eroticize and fetishize its ‘host’.

Dean Fox begins his creative enterprise with a dig. A digital dig, surfing the internet for images of paintings by his chosen source then duly cutting, abbreviating, amplifying and pasting these vignettes together to issue a mélange of matter and moment; matrix and mechanics.

Home and Away – as both title and conceit; journey and oxymoron – is an Episode that embraces such historical dissonance – of source and celebration - even as the contemporary artists it explores betray an association of subject, mood, and design.

Painting is performance. Every stroke a gesture; every mark a movement; every surface a relic. Their orchestration as compositions – be they modelled or planed into pillars of description or kindled into plumes of painterly kinesis–the result of the painter’s physical interaction with tool, medium and support.

Birns’ protagonists betray features that seem to incomprehensibly morph before our eyes, to such an extent that her visages slip between taxonomic cracks: indexically and quite literally. She has invested a series of frogs with human features; melded the human body with the cutesy quintessence of a woolly lamb.

Enter ‘The Great Assassin’. The flocculent, masked necromancer of several nefarious arts that prickles across landscapes of terror and terroir in the paintings of Andrew Maughan.

For an artist whose practice has consistently engaged with the prose of his everyday life, a gentle – yet no less cogent - poesy perfumes the air of Chris Huen Sin-kan’s achingly beautiful paintings.

We arrive at a semblance of self-signification by allowing our unconscious desire for acknowledged presence to yoke itself to more liminal designs of individuality.

Accompanying the first Episode, Bump is a smaller survey – a second Scene - of Bumps on Paper, featuring a medley of works executed in inks, watercolours, pastels, charcoal, pencils, and even blood. Ten artists continue to explore the germination, efflorescence and eventual bloom and boom of the bump in their work; this time, however, in moments invariably more graphic in sensibility and application and always executed on the more supple yet ticklish surface that paper provides.

Trypophobes, look away now, because this essay – and the Episode it dances with – teems with bumps. Bumps that develop from molecular flashes of the painter’s brush; lie dormant in secreted junctures obscured by archaeologies of abstraction, or gently froth in those granular idiosyncrasies quietly authoring a metamorphosis of the physiognomic into the gnomic.

The fulcrum upon which Annice Fell’s paintings find their flow and voice their fortitude – if not necessarily any denouement or equilibrium – is an effervescence of tension, articulated by a series of binary antagonisms – be they born of plane, paint, or process – that, in their contest, imbue Fell’s surface with a lyrical ebullience that registers itself as a lavish cryptanalysis of colour.

‘Mug’. Funny little word. One that seems taxed by its own onomatopoetic groan, especially when enunciated with a northern English accent, transforming that middle ‘you’ into a protracted ‘ooh’, imbued with its own crabby lament.

Nothing fucks you up quite as fucking much as your fucking mum and dad. So whined Britain’s favourite misery guts, Philip Larkin, in his laureated poem, This Be The Verse. Every angst-ridden, acne-riddled adolescent’s preferred paean to parenticide that unfolds over twelve lines in three stanzas all bouncing along in iambic tetrametric alternating rhymes: its rather merry musicality veiling the poet’s acerbic aversion for parenthood, and for pretty much everybody else, in general.

If there’s one place on Earth that’s seen its fair share of change of late, then it’s the United Kingdom. A country whose upper lip is notoriously stiffened by an idiosyncratic taciturnity dictated by a blind, historical devotion to courtesy, class and custom. At times both silly and suffocating, such laconic equanimity does not naturally embrace tides of change.

John Keats’ beautiful poem “What can I do to drive away …”, penned by him whilst still blooming from the simplicity of youth into the complexity of adulthood, voices the immortal phrase: “Touch has a memory”. Keats’ poem is not just an ode to longing but an entreaty to forget.

It was the great British archaeologist, Mortimer Wheeler, who wrote that archaeology was a science that “… must be lived, must be ‘seasoned with humanity’.” (Mortimer Wheeler, Archaeology from the Earth [1954]). Pam Evelyn paints like the archaeologist digs, (ad)dressing her abstract art in much the same way as Wheeler’s archaeologist approaches their science.

In a space, both real and imagined; both ambient and virtual, a hushed conversation takes place between two objects. Both found. Both lost. Both displayed. Both displaced. Jin Meyerson’s installation, Sequence 2 (2021), is made up of two elements. On the wall hangs a small painting of a seascape. The boisterous maelstrom of its crudely executed waves echoes its ruptured physicality, with the canvas ripped open, dangling from the support like Marsyas’ flayed hide.

Once upon a time there lived a husband and wife, John Wayne and Lorenna, in a town called Manassas, Virginia. After a long night of drunken revelry, John Wayne returned home early one morning, rather dishevelled and somewhat amorous. Lorenna, sleepy in bed, did not share her husband’s enthusiasm. Alas Mr. Bobbitt rather insisted on Mrs. Bobbitt’s affections and, after much wrangling, the two momentarily became one. Almost instantly John Wayne fell into a deep sleep. Lorenna, now disturbed and finding herself thirsty, got out of bed and went to her kitchen for a drink of water. It’s at that moment that everything changed. And in but the blink of an eye.

Tucked away in the Hudson River Valley is the small town of Poughkeepsie. It is located in a landscape so stunning that it inspired an entire school of American painters. Artists such as Thomas Cole or Albert Bierstadt were all eager to evince some of the romance and rebus of the American experience; celebrating those modern dynamics of discovery and establishment through an articulation of the timeless grandeur of geography.

Fuck me, we live in curious times. I’m writing this essay sat on a plane headed for New York. It’s a flight I have taken many, many times. Today’s flight is different, though. Firstly, the plane is half empty, which is most unusual. Feels kind of weird. Ominous, even.

sitting here thinking and writing and staring at the laptop and looking out of the kitchen window pissed that it’s raining and colder than it should be for this time of the year listening to talking heads drinking lukewarm tea noting that i bite my nails too much farting and giggling and knowing i need to shit but not enough to get off my chair and go to the toilet and looking at the laptop some more desperate for something anything a hook a sign a line a word that’ll jolt me out of my skin and begin

I have never met Matt Magee. We’ve never spoken. Not in person. Not on the telephone. Yet we share much in common and are equally aware of our curiously congeneric relationship. We have the same name. We’re both married. We’re both gay. We both love art and do our best to make a living out of it – he makes it; I sell it. But the real germ of our nexus lies in the fact we’re both slightly obsessed with #Instagram. See, I even gave it its own #hashtag. Did it again. I can’t help myself.

Now, as promised, I have written my essay for your catalogue and I hope that you like it. Except it is not, technically, a catalogue essay. One of those fuddy-duddy introductions at the beginning of a book. It's this. This email. Which, I hope, you and Emanuele will publish in its entirety.