At the end of August, I was part of the group show Voices From the Crypt, at The Crypt Gallery at St Pancras Church.
It was a big deal for me to be invited. The group of artists are people whose work I respect and admire, and they are all really lovely people too. So being asked to join them was a privilege.
But the show also gave me the opportunity to reconnect with a piece of my past life.
Coming Back to St Pancras
The iconic caryatids of St Pancras Church were a daily sight for me on my way to school throughout the 1980s and 90s. I used to get the 73 bus from Essex Road to Euston to Maria Fidelis Convent School.
So to return to the area, this time as an artist, felt pretty special.
There is an even deeper family connection to the area. My grandfather worked for British Rail, based in Euston and St Pancras in the 1970s. When my father first arrived in England from Ireland in the 1960s, Euston Station was his first encounter with the country.
The area is in my DNA.
So I wanted the works in the show to be personal to me, and I wanted at least one piece to reference the area specifically.
Post Rave Come Down
I was allocated a beautiful black nook in the Crypt. Because I had plenty of notice, I was able to make pieces with the space in mind, rather than trying to fit existing work into it.
The main piece, Post Rave Come Down, is acrylic, crayon and silver leaf on canvas and tarpaulin. It was made in dedication to the area.
I was thinking about the site of Bagley’s, at the back of King’s Cross station.
In the mid-to-late 80s, when I first went to secondary school, the area was pretty unloved and was famed for criminality and sex work. In the early 90s, the old bottle-maker warehouse, Bagley’s, became a club, just in time for my coming of age, when I was into “that kind of thing”.
Now it is Coal Drops Yard: a very corporate site of businesses, shopping and lunches, with a name trading on its old history. I’ve even gone to a few working lunches there. It is a site that has seen so much, with layers and layers of stories.
The colours and shiny silver in Post Rave Come Down evoke my memories of a site that was unloved, then utilised for collective fun and personal discovery.
The painted, tattered, semi-transparent tarpaulin references the site’s continual state of transition; a landscape in a constant state of dereliction, occupation, rebellion, building and rebuilding.
Childhood Memories
My other pieces were an exploration of my childhood.
Sunbathing and Paddling; Ski Jackets, Jelly Shoes and Swings and Sunny Days Filled With Hope remember that sliver of concrete and the old playgrounds, buffered by flats, garages and the people who inhabited them.
Those places and people are all gone now, but they remain somewhere in my memory. They are imagined landscapes with hidden messages to people who I loved that aren’t here anymore.
Voices From the Crypt
The Crypt Gallery is a historic 19th-century burial vault, so it would have been easy for the space itself to dominate the work.
But it didn’t.
Instead, the eclectic show brought together drawing, sculpture, painting, film, assemblage, stitching, collage and installation. The works responded to the Crypt itself, its shadows, its architecture and its charged stillness.
I really loved everyone’s work and was so pleased to have the opportunity to work alongside them.
The Artists
Catriona Faulkner; Doug Selway; Eves Eveson; Jennie Sharman-Cox; Jill Desborough; Karen Christensen; Marsha Roddy; Rodger Worth; Stephen Cooper; Tilly Worth and Will Adams. [works below in artist order]
