City of Fire & Beautiful Bricks Exhibition at Two Doors Studio

I couldn't be more delighted that all the works are now up on the wall as a comprehensive story, curated in the most part by Ruthie, and open to viewing with immediate effect. The exhibition will officially be launched to coincide with Two Doors Studio 10th Anniversary 'Birthday' Party on Saturday 28th March starting at 10am until 4pm. All are welcome along to celebrate with complimentary Prosecco, and a specially commissioned Birthday cake of course!

Complimentary soft drinks, tea and coffee are also available.

There is car parking at the back of the gallery.

Trains run to Alsager from Crewe and Stoke and all stops to Derby and Nottingham.

Gallery Information/ directions - Handcrafted Gifts Cards & Artwork | Two Doors Studio | Stoke-on-Trent

The bricks on the houses in this neighbourhood are still smoke-blackened and the streets are still as quiet and empty as they are in my memory of them from childhood days. Gone though, is the faint and pervading smell of smoke, and of freshly creosoted fences in the Summer sun hanging in the air. 

 Every now and again I refresh myself of these Northwood and Birches Head streets; the streets of my parents' early life, and those of their parents before them. Neither the geography nor topography has changed; the long ribbons of streets intersected by alleyways and entries only accentuate the steep drops and high inclines of the landscape on which they are built. Cars are infinitely more prolific now of course and they gatecrash my memories. These streets weren't planned for these machines and they throw the scale of Victorian Architecture askew in crowding the pavements and tight corners as they do. As a child I walked these near empty streets with my granddad, on the way to one or another park, or perhaps longer still, to Burslem across the reclaimed land that was Hanley Deep Pit to visit his five sisters for an afternoon tea and a chat. 

 My memory is of a brutal industrial landscape punctuated with the redeeming features of postage stamp sized immaculate gardens and flowering plants. Occasionally there was a person tending to such, to which there was a brief and courteous acknowledgement or succinct conversation sharpened to a point made. 

  These streets punctuated my growing-up journey every three years and on each and every visit they took on a new and unique significance of ever growing proportions which became wholly realised in collaboration with friend and author Dave Proudlove on his first book titled ‘Ballad of the Streets’ which documents the stages of ever growing and evolving personal boundaries in the progression of boy to man. How as babies we are looked upon in the pram in the yard, and out to the day we take our first solo bus ride into town with all the senses of adventure unfolding before us; sensory and emotional experiences in overdrive. 

Click image to purchase from Barewall. Signed copies are also available in Two Doors Studio.

 This seminal book both confirmed and cemented my art practice into an ongoing series of walks taken over the course of my life along with all the people accompanying me on them along the way. I make myself walk them regularly and they are always loaded with emotional significance not least as a way of remembering those long gone, and as an ongoing observation of the ever evolving life of the City of Stoke-On-Trent. 

 My work is in entirety about my emotional connections to this place over the course of my life; A City of Fire and Beautiful Bricks.. 

 If life is a series of circular events then it's serendipitous that Two Doors Studio be the venue to a body of work that has thrilled me in its development through all of the above in its realisation because Alsager is where I started my own singular journey into a culture shock of immense proportions into the UK.  That is the ongoing story of my life.