Past Events

Join the artist for an illustrated talk on his work followed by a personal tour of The Kidd at The Boxing Club

Commissioned by Foreground, Brian Griffiths’ The Kidd, has been created especially for the recently vacated Frome Amateur Boxing Club. Tucked away in a small alley off Butts Hill, a little further up the hill than the Wesley Methodist Church, the boxing club is a modest piece of vernacular architecture – a single storey wooden building of simple construction. The building is both physically hidden from the general public by its location but has also been an almost private space for decades, known and used only by club members.

Griffiths makes installations that are populated with sculptures assembled from familiar found objects. These everyday materials are manipulated, reconstructed and re-imagined into fantastical machines, carnivalesque characters and environments that offer the promise of new functions and the entry point into unravelling fictions. In Griffiths’ hands the history of the Boxing Club becomes just one narrative amongst many potential narratives at play within the building. The exhibition takes its title from a name written on an old military kit bag from World War II that will be used as the basis of one of the many sculptures in the exhibition, Griffiths has used it to summarize ideas of youth, ambition and showmanship that run through the exhibition. Tents, kit bags and clothes are ornately tied to the inside of the building, these objects of travel, adventure and history create a tension that seems to hold the faded and failing building together as much as the building seems to contain the objects and stories that are packed within it. Together they create a Russian doll of ideas stretching from a small building in Frome to the outer reaches of the universe in a mildly epic examination of an inexperienced individual in an unfathomably large and complicated world.

The exhibition opens on 22nd September and will be open Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 12-6pm until 28th October. Please see www.foregroundprojects.org.uk for more information.

Brain Griffiths was born in 1968 in Stratford-Upon-Avon and was educated at the University of Humberside and Goldsmiths College, London. Recent major projects include On: A re-imagining of the Blackpool Illuminations, Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool; British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet, Hayward Touring Exhibition, touring nationally 2010/11; Rude Britannia, Tate Britain, London, 2010; The Only Living, Greenland Street, A Foundation, Liverpool, 2007; Life is a Laugh, Platform for Art Commission, London, 2007 and Beneath the Stride of Giants, Camden Arts Centre, London, 2004.

Based in Frome, Somerset, Foreground commissions contemporary visual art projects that explore the relationship between art and its diverse settings and publics.