‘It’s Coming From Inside’ is part of ”Windows and Thresholds’ for ‘The Dulwich Festival’. Over 40 artists – painters, printmakers, sculptors, filmmakers and photographers show work in a series of six independently curated exhibitions in Bell House.
With a nod to the new Berthe Morisot show at Dulwich Picture Gallery, Windows and Thresholds considers whether these are barriers symbolic of separation and division or portals of opportunity. Looking inwards and outwards, a group of female curators each take a room and invite us to cross over into their worlds.
Sarah Sparkes and Jane Millar have invited 20 artists to exhibit across two rooms, and a hallway, on opposing sides of Bell House: the McAndrew room, a scullery, tucked away off a long corridor lined with coat hooks, and the Lutyens’ room, a light-filled drawing room, close to the elegant front entrance.
In their thinking about the Impressionist Berthe Morisot, and the exhibitions broader theme of ‘Windows and Thresholds’, the curators see the two different domestic spaces, and the liminal corridors between them, as places expressive of dialogues in both Morisot’s and their invited artists’ works: of confines, dreams of escape, of external inscrutability and internal passion.
The Lutyens’ Room becomes a cabinet of entrance and exits, of frames, veils and delicacy; a parlour for a person of leisure; for ornament, miniatures and portraits. The shelves, the mantelpiece and a curved table, act as spaces for mementos and intimacy.
Just outside the McAndrew Room the corridor, with its many coat hooks, is a passage of transformation, for casting off the norms of everyday by putting on garments that consume, creep, and protect.
The McAndrew Room, a scullery, is a warm and informal domestic space where materials shift across themes of food, the body, flesh, plant, clothing, clay. A wine red fireplace in this space is seen by the curators as a portal for energies that move, along the corridor and antechambers, to the Lutyens’ Room, and out, through the windows, to the outside.
Artists: Fran Burden | Ruth Calland | Helen Carr | Mikey Cuddihy | Janet Currier | Robert Dawson | Andrew Ekins | Liz Elton | Lisa Fielding-Smith | Deborah Gardner | Caroline Gregory | Birgitta Hosea | Mindy Lee | Wayne Lucas | Julia Maddison | Jane Millar | Darren O’Brien | Kim Pace | Sarah Sparkes | Geraldine Swayne
| Duration | 13 May 2023 - 21 May 2023 |
| Times | Opening Night: 12 May, 6pm to 8pm Exhibition open: 13/14 and 20/21 May, 11am to 6pm |
| Cost | Free |
| Venue | Bell House |
| Address | 27 College Road, Dulwich, London, SE21 7BG, , |
| Contact | / thesarahsparkes@gmail.com / www.bellhouse.co.uk/artists-open-house-2023 |