Drew Mulholland
Stone from the ruins of St James Old Church at Bix Bottom, Oxfordshire, one of the locations filmed in Blood on Satan's Claw
Fragment of wood from the leg stumps of the original Wicker Man prop structure, on the Isle of Whithorn, Scotland
Formerly known as Mount Vernon Arts Lab, Mulholland's pioneering work at the intersection of sound, memory and place is defined by psychogeography and hauntology. A sonic archaeologist, utilising sounds emanating from sacred objects; it's their unconscious connections that give his work such resonance.
[Somerset House]
Taken in the exhibition
Ghost
The show’s second act, Ghost, marks the collapse of hyperinflated 80s culture into an uncanny temperature change that presided over the 90s and early 00s. It traces an unsettling path through to the global financial crisis of 2008, a turning point in time between a century of old and new, at the dawn of a digital age of faceless audiences and invisible cyber wars.
Derek Jarman’s last feature and magnum opus, Blue (1993), offers a profound evocation of the artist’s final days, marrying comforting connection with disconnection from the world, warmth with coldness, as Jarman poetically narrates his approach towards death. Newly commissioned, immersive sound installations from Laura Grace Ford and Nick Ryan highlight the strange frequencies of an age that saw the emergence of trance music and readily accessible sampling machines. Ford’s installation explores the sonic textures of the city to uncover those hiding in the black spots that neoliberalism has failed to assimilate, while Ryan’s voices form a call-and-response, as visitors become spectator, spectacle and a ghost in the machine. Works from Jeremy Millar and Gavin Turk unsettle with a paradoxical clash of ghostly presence and absence, familiarity and otherness. Cornelia Parker’s map, scorched with a heated meteorite fragment, tells a tale of apocalypse for the end of the millennium and the fear of the unknown.
In the 1990s, a generation emerge whose childhood imaginations were indelibly marked in the 1970s by horror films and the televised ghost stories of MR James and Nigel Kneale. Now they play in the gaps between fact and fiction, retrieving relics from a mythical celluloid world and meticulously documenting imaginary realities. These otherlands are out of time an dout of joint. The distinction between fantasy and reality blurred, allowing parallel worlds and alternative states of mind to invade our homes and our heads.
Contributing artists include A Guy Called Gerald, Barry Adamson, Hamad Butt, Adam Chodzko, Kevin Cummins, Graham Dolphin, Tim Etchells, Angus Fairhurst, Paul Finnegan, Laura Grace Ford, Ghostwatch, Lucy Gunning, Paul Heartfield, Susan Hiller, Matthew Holness & Richard Ayoade, Stewart Home, Derek Jarman, Michael Landy, Richard Littler (Scarfolk), Jeremy Millar, Haroon Mirza, Drew Mulholland, Pat Naldi & Wendy Kirkup, Cornelia Parker, Steve Pemberton, Nic Roeg, Nick Ryan, Scanner (Robin Rimbaud), Adam Scovell, Sensory Leakage, Reece Shearsmith, David Shrigley, Iain Sinclair, Kerry Stewart, Tricky, Gavin Turk, Richard Wells, Rachel Whiteread and Words & Pictures.
[Somerset House]
The Horror Show! A Twisted Tale of Modern Britain
(October 2022 - February 2023)
Somerset House presents The Horror Show!: A Twisted Tale of Modern Britain, a major exhibition exploring how ideas rooted in horror have informed the last 50 years of creative rebellion. The show looks beyond horror as a genre, instead taking it as a reaction and provocation to our most troubling times. The last five decades of modern British history are recast as a story of cultural shapeshifting told through some of our country’s most provocative artists. The Horror Show! offers a heady ride through the disruption of 1970s punk to the revolutionary potential of modern witchcraft, showing how the anarchic alchemy of horror – its subversion, transgression and the supernatural – can make sense of the world around us. Horror not only allows us to voice our fears; it gives us the tools to stare them down and imagine a radically different future.
Featuring over 200 artworks and culturally significant objects, this landmark show tells a story of the turbulence, unease and creative revolution at the heart of the British cultural psyche in three acts – Monster, Ghost and Witch. Each act interprets a specific era through the lens of a classic horror archetype, in a series of thematically linked contemporaneous and new works:
Each of the exhibition’s acts opens with ‘constellations’ of talismanic objects. These cabinets of curiosities speak to significant cultural shifts and anxieties in each era, while invoking a haunting from the counter-cultural voices in recent British history. Alongside these introductory artworks and ephemera is an atmospheric soundtrack, conjuring the spirit of the time with music from Bauhaus, Barry Adamson and Mica Levi.
Monster, Ghost and Witch culminate in immersive installations, combining newly commissioned work, large-scale sculpture, fashion and sound installation, with each chapter signed off with a neon text-work by Tim Etchells. The Horror Show! offers an intoxicating deep-dive into the counter-cultural, mystic and uncanny, with the signature design of the three acts courtesy of architects Sam Jacob Studio and Grammy-winning creative studio Barnbrook.
[Somerset House]
