Art / Dan Guthrie
Spike Island presents twin exhibitions from Danielle Dean and Dan Guthrie
Ahead of its twin exhibitions for Spring 2025, Spike Island will be opening its doors for an evening preview on February 7.
Multidisciplinary artist Danielle Dean works across video, painting, installation, performance and social practice – often working in collaboration with the communities she is researching.
Through her work, she examines the influence that commercial narratives may have on the individual, as well as interrogating “representations of labour, racialised identity and popular culture”.
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Danielle Dean, Hemel (2024). Production still – photo: courtesy the artist and 47 Canal
Accompanied by a series of dystopian drawings, at the centre of her exhibition This Could All Be Yours! is a fact and fiction-blurring film called Hemel, co-commissioned by Mercer Union, Toronto; Spike Island and The Vega Foundation.
Splicing archival and contemporary footage of her home town (Hemel Hempstead), the film also references a sci-fi horror B-movie Quartermass II, shot there in 1957.
In the original film, the arrival of a non-human entity endangers local the lives of residents, spreading a toxic black slime through the town. Expanding on the colonial overtones of this narrative, Dean uses Hemel “to consider the race, class and labour dynamics of a small English town in today’s post-Brexit context”.
Dan Guthrie, ‘Rotting Figure’ (2024). Production still – photo: courtesy the artist
Dan Guthrie is an artist working primarily with the moving image. His practice engages with “representations and mis-representations of Black Britishness”, looking in particular at how these may manifest in rural areas.
Empty Alcove / Rotting Figure is a new solo exhibition from Guthrie, commissioned and produced by Spike Island and Chisenhale Gallery, London, with support from the Henry Moore Foundation.
The work explores the artist’s ongoing interest with the ‘Blackboy Clock’, described as “an object of contested heritage” that is displayed publicly in his hometown of Stroud.
Research image by Dan Guthrie – photo: courtesy the artist
Originally created by local watchmaker John Miles in 1774 – coinciding with the height of the transatlantic slave trade – the piece depicts a wooden blackamoor figure within a clock design. Some 70 years later, it was integrated into a former schoolhouse clock in the town, where it remains to this day, undergoing some restorative work in 1977 and 2004.
Guthrie has created two films presenting the notion of the clock’s ‘radical un-conservation’ – a new theoretical term coined by the artist to describe “the acquisition of an object with the express intent to destroy it”.
The work poses questions about the artefacts we choose to memorialise as a society, as well as the means of doing so. Complementing the exhibition, an online platform will be launching at earf.info, documenting the clock’s timeline, from its historical origins to current debates about its future.
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Dan Guthrie: Empty Alcove / Rotting Figure and Danielle Dean: This Could All Be Yours! are at Spike Island from February 8-May 11, with an evening preview on February 7 at 6-10pm.
The gallery is open 12-5pm, Wednesday to Sunday. For more information, visit www.spikeisland.org.uk.
Main photo: Dan Weill
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