Up Deva was a response to the Chester Contemporary event held in 2023, and curated by Ryan Gander. This visual arts festival brought together established and emerging artists to show work across Chester. The theme for Chester Contemporary was ‘Centred on the Periphery’, described as ‘an exploration of how places on the edges of the centre, often just out of sight of the mainstream, can become the primary focus’. 

During the festival I chose to exhibit work at Chester Pride’s Rainbow Tea Rooms in the city centre, and collaborated with designer and illustrator Steph Coathupe to produce an exhibition of ten works. I provided Steph with photographs of Pompeii that I had taken on a visit to Italy in 1989. Steph used these as settings for her drawings of animals that she had observed at Chester zoo. The resulting montages were a satire on the Chester Contemporary event: the ruins of Pompeii stood in for the Roman settlement of Chester; zoo animals had been allowed to roam free to eat the visitors, alternatively the zoo animals could be seen as the fabulous creatures – visitors – who had come to see the visual arts event. 

Writer Hannah Harry provided the accompanying texts for this exhibition. A companion piece to Up Deva showed at Chester’s Storyhouse and was titled Wild Whispers. This was in collaboration with Estelle Woolley and Luke Moore. 

Up Deva was the first of five exhibitions that I curated at the Tea Rooms. For each exhibition I wrote an accompanying article for the Liverpool-based online magazine The Double Negative.

Up Deva
Collaboration with Steph Coathupe and Hannah Harry
September–December 2023
The Rainbow Tea Rooms, Chester.

Wild Whispers 
Collaboration with Estelle Woolley and Luke Moore
30 October–11 November 2023
Storyhouse, Chester.