KNOW ONE

K NOW  O N E
Crouch End Open Studios 13 -14 May 2017
Garden Flat, 33 Clifton Road, London N8 8JA

Chrissie Hynde, in a recent documentary, said she likes to walk through cemeteries calling out the names on the tombstones. “When,” she asked, “was the last time their names were heard out loud?”

KNOW ONE is an exhibition of images and words, an exercise in imaginary reconstruction. Three artists – two painters and a poet – have picked one name from a memorial or gravestone from each of London’s ‘magnificent seven’ Victorian cemeteries: Kensal Green, West Norwood, Highgate, Abney Park, Nunhead, Brompton and Tower Hamlets. With a little research each character has been reimagined and in some sense reinvented. This is not an attempt at resurrection, but rather a way of bending memory to the present. To walk through a cemetery is to walk through a community of unknown, but completed, and now largely forgotten lives. Know One asks us to do a little remembering, even if that requires fictional accounts of lost lives. Memories, even our own, perhaps especially our own, are often false. We create narratives of our lives that seen from an objective viewpoint might be unrecognizable. Our subjects, our no-ones, stand for all those forgotten lives, our own (as they will be in due course) included.

POET
Wynn Wheldon is a critic and poet. He has published two collections of poetry, Tiny Disturbances (Acumen, 2012) and Private Places (IDP, 2016). His most recent book is a biography of his father, Huw Wheldon, Kicking the Bar (Unbound, 2016). He is married with three sons and lives in North London. He walks his dog everyday in Hampstead cemetery. www.wynnwheldon.com

ARTISTS

Sue Spaull’s paintings owe a lot to the Old Masters, adopting some time-honoured techniques which she uses to her own ends. Her paintings create a narrative, through her use of composition, paint application and setting. Her play with classical techniques, where images emerge and disappear as the underlying grisaille is at times exposed, at times overlayed with glazes and paint, contributes to the sense that she is capturing forgotten memories through her series of Know One paintings as she re-imagines aspects of lives once lived.
Sue has had her work shown at the Mall Galleries as part of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters Annual Exhibition and in the Federation of British Artists Exhibition. Other exhibitions include What are you looking at? (solo), The Strand Gallery, Progression, the Menier Gallery and The Breakfast Club, Underdog Gallery. She was recently commissioned by the Old Vic to paint a portrait of Glenda Jackson for the publicity for her performance of King Lear. Sue is Deputy Head of Painting at The Art Academy, London. www.suespaull.com


Sue Spaull
Lydia Emma Booth (Sue), 2017 Oil on linen
20 x 30 cm

Sirpa Pajunen-Moghissi uses a variety of materials to rebuild the stories of these chosen names. She tries to untangle the lost memories and create images that are loosly based on facts; she borrows both from her own family history and some from the research that is done of each subject. Her art works are created through multiple layers and by a process of deconstruction and rearrangement.
Selected Exhibitions include Royal Academy Summer Exhibition; Hide and Seek, Highgate Contemporary Art (solo); Camou age, Koleksiyon, London; Scandinavia; A Celebration of the Nordic Province, London and Kaapelitehdas, Helsinki, Finland. She is also co-founder and

director of ArtKapsule.

www.sirpamoghissi.com



Sirpa Pajunen-Moghissi
Lydia Emma Booth (Sirpa), 2017 Collage, watercolour and spray paint on giclee print 
(Hahnemühle Photo Rag Pearl , 320gsm)
61 x61cm

For further information or hi-res images please contact: Sirpa Pajunen-Moghissi tel. 077 11 00 88 98, email: sirpamoghissi@hotmail.com