Brigitte Mulholland is thrilled to present Hamish Chapman’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Forget-Me-Nots, opening 1 February. The show marks a return to an early form for the artist: paintings and collaged materials on foam cutouts, often accompanied with collaged frames. Bouquets of flowers, bows, and a semi-autobiographical blond-haired character populate the works, encrusted with objects and frames including jewels, cutouts from pulp gay magazines, glitter, and snail shells. The title of show derives from the ubiquitous flowers typical in England’s bouquets and gardens - a major part of their childhood. The flowers, and all of the objects and ephemera in the show, serve as symbols of remembrance of the artist’s history, like souvenirs or markers of time - each a kind of memento mori. Kitsch and elegant knicknacks are the seemingly opposing factors in the work - a hybrid of the ubiquitousness of gay magazines in the queer scene, and the English obsession with ornamentation. Yet both are actually, as the artist realises, two sides of the same coin. The jagged edges of the foam cutouts, juxtaposed with the elegant imagery mirrors the impulses of both: highbrow and lowbrow, posh and kitsch - which unite to form the unforgettable, deeply personal, work in the exhibition.
The flowers found throughout the show are typical to English gardens: tulips, forget-me-nots, and geraniums. Gardens and gardening have always been important to the artist, and are a part of very personal childhood memories, when Chapman used to garden with their mum. Likewise, the image of the snail, including actual snail shells incorporated into the work, are significant on many levels. Snails are an indicator of passing time, moving, and the sense of taking home with you - another important symbol for the artist, who recently moved from the UK to New York. Most land snails are also coded with queerness: hermaphrodites with potential for self-fertilization and reproduction. On an even deeper personal level, Chapman’s first memory is of collecting snails with their brother in London: the creatures coming out in abundance when it rained in Kent - and the artist, at this young age, noted the snail’s increased vulnerability and fragility in this state.
From a childhood spent in English homes, where one would compose home decor through boot fairs, auctions, and antiques, Chapman now does the same through detritus of nightlife and queer culture, the jumble of materials and objects in New York – peeling silver paint on pipes, faded flowers and prints in windows of East Village, the hodgepodge of images, objects, and references on the walls of bathrooms in gay bars - which are also simultaneously accompanied by bourgeois trinkets and memorabilia in the works. Ordering these disparate items are the artist’s means of taking the personal to the universal: images taken from their own personal queer mythology of experiences and self, as a means to discuss everyone’s own personal journey to make sense of themselves. The works in the exhibition mine both the nostalgia of childhood and the complications of growing into an adult - and how those impulses remain, but evolve into something that may seem utterly foreign to its roots. Kept trinkets become markers of time - as one is always the sum of their parts.
