Member no 3209, Barnie Page sends us details of an exciting new exhibition opening on 25th April 2024 at The Old Music Centre, 49 London Road, Stroud, GL5 2AD
Sacred Thing announces Bat, Moon, Womb, the debut exhibition by Tump, a newly-formed female artist collective speculating on the past, present and future of the UK’s enigmatic megalithic structures.
Tump, a newly-formed collective of artists based in Stroud (Gloucestershire, UK), will hold their debut exhibition in a former restaurant in the centre of the Cotswold market town.
The three artists, Alex Merry, Flora Wallace and Milligan Beaumont, who are all established creatives in their own right, have come together as Tump for this exhibition because of their shared interest in the spiritual experience of the local landscape and its ancient history.
The exhibition, entitled Bat, Moon, Womb, takes as its starting point Hetty Pegler’s Tump, a well-preserved example of a Neolithic chambered burial mound in Uley, near Stroud. The artists have spent time inside the long barrow, creating automatic drawings and writings (a technique developed by the Surrealists in the 1920s as a way of tapping into the artists’ repressed psyche), assimilating its internal environment and carrying out a sensory archaeology through a combination of intuition, soil samples and field recordings. It is accepted that the tump was used as a place for burial, but we will never know the full extent of its significance. It is this place of unknowing that Tump have found to be fertile with inspiration, imagining histories and reconsidering their own connections to life, death
and the land.
Over yonder
Over mound and moon
Lead me to death
Where I am born
- Automatic writing by Milligan Beaumont
The outcome is an expansive multi-media exhibition that probes and reimagines how the tump may have been used, not only by those who constructed it more than 5,000 years ago but also by other human and non-human beings in the many succeeding years. The exhibition will transform the former restaurant into a womb-like chamber which will house artworks made inside the tump, along with relics, grave goods, artefacts, sculptures, paintings, textiles, audio pieces, video and ceremonial performances that have been made in response to the artists’ experience and understanding of Hetty Pegler’s Tump. There will be two evening performances which will include a live performance by musician Cosmo Sheldrake among other collaborators.
The title of the exhibition is taken from an observation made during the artists’ first visit to the tump that felt significant as a triad of interconnected symbols, the bat, the moon and the womb. Upon entering the tump, the artists were met with a sleeping bat, a creature that in many cultures is seen as a messenger from the spirit world for its ability to sense what it can’t see. In shamanism it is symbolic of death and life, endings and beginnings.
The moon is widely recognised as a symbol of femininity and the embodiment of life cycles. It is intrinsically and mysteriously connected to the female reproductive system and there is even evidence to suggest that the number of births occurring during a full moon is greater than other phases of the lunar cycle. In mythological lore, long barrows hold a special significance as gateways to the domain of the goddess, their entrances are interpreted as symbolic representations of the goddess's vagina, with the interior likened to her womb.
INFORMATION
25th - 28th April 2024
Performances on Thursday 25th and Sunday 28th at 6.30pm
Private view on Thursday 25th April 7 - 9pm
The Old Music Centre
49 London Road
Stroud, GL5 2AD