Taking its title from The Pilgrim’s Progess by John Bunyan, From This World, To That Which Is To Come adopts the parable’s infamous fictional pilgrimage as an allegory for a collapse of mental health and fraught journey to recovery.
Featuring works that range from the darkly comic to the startlingly affirmative, the exhibition is a multi-media exploration – sound installations, sculpture, films – of the complex and often fragile nature of the human mind. The artist examines the powerful role mental health plays in our daily lives. Chapter explores this motif across its artistic programme in Spring 2020.
This large-scale solo exhibition at Chapter is Brimfield’s first in Wales and comprises three major works.
Stand A collaboration with the composer Gwyneth Herbert exploring the value of, and access to, creativity in the treatment of mental illness. This epic sixteen-channel sound-piece is based on an extraordinary recording of a long-term in-patient reciting poetry.
Ungeziefer In this work of black comedy, a hapless voiceover artist in a recording studio attempts to record an abridged audiobook of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (a novel interpreted by some as an account of a psychotic episode).
Xenobath This intense piece, comprising a poetic binaural monologue and an oscillating swarm of voices, explores accounts of the altered states of perception often associated with psychosis such as hearing voices and visual hallucinations.
Stand is commissioned by Kelham Island Museum, Sheffield and is also touring to The Tetley, Leeds.
Preview: Friday 20 March, 6-8pm
About The Artist
Mel Brimfield’s lively and diverse visual art practice appropriates theatrical and mainstream entertainment formats to explore the boundaries of performance art in the 20th and 21st Century. Her work is the result of intensive collaboration with a rolling cast of actors, composers, musicians, designers, choreographers, dancers and singers and results in photographic, film and large-scale live performance works.
Image (stills): Xenobath 2019 | film
