Georgina Hill: Bread and Wine at South Parade

South Parade, Griffin House, 79 Saffron Hill, London EC1R 5BU
16 February - 23 March 2024

Georgina Hill’s exhibition titled ‘Bread and wine’ emphasises the values and hierarchies that we assign to the material world. Whether iconographic (religious or otherwise), aesthetic or illusionary, the exhibition questions the signs and signifiers of subject and object concerning reality, imagination, and societal constructs.  

Entering the exhibition, the viewer encounters a series of wooden panel structures (Bread and wine, 2024), arranged in a booth-like layout, with decorative elements that replicate the interior architecture of public houses and featuring upper sections of stained-glass panelling that obscure our line of sight across the room. The scent of redwood fills the space as one becomes keenly aware of this material and its porosity, absorbing the stains, smells and marks of convivial gatherings where secrets, idle gossip, ponderings and conspiracies are exchanged over drinks.  

For Hill, however, it is the emphasis on craftmanship that is most central to the work: how should such technical skill and precision be situated within the force and mechanics of production that condition our world, past and present? What makes these booths alluring is their ability to transfigure folkloric imagery through both digital and analogue processes. Images of dancers, butterflies and handkerchiefs are enlarged, blurred, and reduced to pixels which are then translated into stained glass panels. Each panel carefully marries the next as pane-by-pane shades of green, pink, red, blue and black coalesce; they echo the legacies of minimalist painting a la Agnes Martin. The repetitive and methodical procedure through which these panels were produced speaks to Hill’s ingrained relation with the craft of woodworking and stained glassmaking, both of which run in her family; the panels themselves were created at her family home.  

In a room next to the gallery entrance, gridded pixels are projected high onto the wall, each grid changing hue at varying intervals. Captured over the course of a week spent in the Herefordshire countryside, the video (Landscape, 2024) is based on footage of sunrises and sunsets that has undergone digital processing to remove any semblance of mimesis. What emerges is a glistening throw of squares that slowly and vividly dance in correlation to the changing light, bleeding from one frame to the next.  

Placed on the floor of the final room is a screenprint titled “Dummy,” 2024. Approaching the work at a particular angle subverts our three-dimensional perception of the garment depicted and for a moment one perceives the discarded shirt as being physically real. The inspiration for this exercise in trickery was the 1963 escape of prisoners from the infamous Alcatraz Penitentiary in the United States. Inmates used clothing to create makeshift figures under their beds to lure guards into their cells. The efficacy of pareidolia (The human tendency to find meaningful images in seemingly random patterns), whilst capitalised within this work, is also subtly highlighted in the rest of the exhibition, through the distortion of layered glass, the smell of timber, changing tones of light and sound and through art historical readings of human perception in relation to the material world.  

Playing throughout the space is an hour-long composition by artist Avel Mismo. Responding to the conceptual framing of the exhibition, Mismo’s soundscape consists of undulating rhythms that cyclically intensify and settle. The reverberations evoke metal plates, cups and trinkets clinking in unison, long drawn-out breaths and electrifying accordion beats that routinely glitch. The composition feels akin to the genre of electroacoustic computer music and its leaders in the field such as Terre Thaemlitz aka DJ Sprinkles.  

The works in the show are congruently woven together to produce a rich, materially led narrative that does well to elude categorisation whilst prompting a critical dance with semiotics.  

Jordan Mouzouris 
Curator, Digital

South Parade
Griffin House, 79 Saffron Hill
Opening Times: Wednesday - Saturday, 12-6pm
Exhibition open until 23 March 2024