colony in Australia – the aspiration and theawfulness of it. The unintended consequenceof probably his only criminal offence, itamounts to a compelling story that should
be more widely known.
This exhibition is organised in partnership
between Ikon and the Tasmanian Museumand Art Gallery.
Find out more
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully
illustrated catalogue, with texts by Gaye
Sculthorpe (Curator, The British Museum),Jane Stewart (Principal Curator, TasmanianMuseum and Art Gallery) and Hamish
Maxwell-Stewart (Professor of SocialHistory, University of Tasmania). Available
from Ikon Shop and online.

Edmund Clark
In Place of Hate
6 December 2017 – 11 March 2018
Second Floor Galleries
Visibility is a long standing theme in the history
and theory of detention. People effectively
disappear when they become prisoners. ‘We’ on
the outside cease to see ‘them’ on the inside, as if
humanity stops at the exterior wall. Or the police
mug shot. Except, hopefully, to their family andfriends, but that may depend on the crime.
British artist Edmund Clark is Ikon’s artistin-residence (2014–18) at Europe’s only
entirely therapeutic prison, HMP Grendon.
Established in 1962, Grendon’s inmates makea full-time commitment to intensive grouptherapy and exercise a degree of control
over the day-to-day running of their lives
through democratic decision-making.
Clark – an artist with a longstanding
interest in incarceration and its effects –has produced a body of work shaped by
the prison environment, community andtherapeutic processes. Unable to makework that identifies Grendon’s inmates, his
exhibition combines photography, video andinstallation in exploring ideas of visibility,
representation, trauma and self-image.

In 1.98m2, wild and cultivated plants fromthe prison grounds are suspended above
a lightbox, the inside dimensions of whichcorrespond to the size of a cell at Grendon.
Clark picked the flowers and leaves andpressed them between sheets of prison issue
paper towels under art books in his Grendon
office. With permission from the Head ofSecurity, Clark took camera equipment into
the prison for filming Vanishing Point, which
follows the journeys of prisoners and staff
around the gardens, exercise yards andcorridors. The videos, including one of theentire interior prison perimeter, the one
journey never made by inmates, have beenredacted for security purposes.
Psychodrama is one of the main creative
therapies in which the prisoners, all men,revisit events from their past under expert
supervision, including women staff. The
department agreed to collaborate with
Clark on a filmed psychodrama response
to Aeschylus’s Oresteia. The characters are
performed by the staff, whilst the prisoners
identify with the perpetrators, victims orwitnesses central to the Greek tragedy. The
purpose of the mask is twofold: to ensure
the anonymity of the prisoners and inaccordance with the customary presentationof ancient drama. The two closer camera
angles have been redacted according toMinistry of Justice requirements. The three
screen film, fusing accepted representationsof high art with narratives of incarceration, isshown as part of an installation comprisingprison chairs, arranged in the typical circle ofsmall therapy groups. Diagrams taken from aprison corridor and group therapy room aredisplayed alongside the film.
The multi-projector installation My
Shadow’s Reflection comprises a triptych of
photographs showing prison architecture,
the picked and pressed plants and images ofmembers of the community. The latter are
made with a pinhole camera, a device thathas no lens to shape the image. Created in agroup situation each subject, including menand staff, stands before the camera for six
minutes, answering questions about theircriminal and personal histories. As they talkand move they form a picture of themselves.
Here the resulting images are projected

onto the green bed sheets that the prisoners
sleep on at night, a time described by themas ‘hard lock up’, when they reflect on thenarratives of violence, abuse and neglect
revealed during daily therapy.
The material of the installation forms
a stand-alone publication of the same
name, given to the prisoners and staff
who took part in the project, and sent to
key individuals in the policy making andcoverage of the criminal justice system.
The men’s responses to their pin hole
images, through words or by writing,painting or drawing on prints of thephotographs, appear in the exhibition andcatalogue. Since 2014, Clark has run art
groups at HMP Grendon. The work producedby the inmates has been displayed annuallyin the prison, with specific works enteredinto the Koestler Awards exhibitions.
Through the various exhibitions, publications
and symposia, the residency has addressed
how prisoners are perceived and discussed
by the public, politicians and media in Britain
today. As Clark observes,
In the binary of good and evil that afflicts thediscussion of criminal justice, human beings arerefracted into sharp stereotypes of victim andperpetrator. Once inside they become indefinite
presences.
Presented in partnership with HMP Grendon
and the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky
Charitable Trust.
Find out more
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully
illustrated catalogue, with texts by Jamie
Bennett (Governor of HMP Grendon), Liz
McLure and Noel Smith. Available from Ikon
Shop and online.

Second FloorGalleries

6

Resource
Room53
4

Entrance↓2

1

1. 1.98m2, 2017
2. Vanishing Point, 2017
Longest video, 18 minutes 53 seconds
3. Oresteia, 2017
74 minutes
4. Untitled Diagram 1, 2017
5. Untitled Diagram 2, 2017
6. My Shadow’s Reflection, 2017
Resource Room
Pinhole Image Interventions, 2017
Second Floor Landing
Fish Tank, 2017
Five videos, 1 minute each
Ikon Reception
Fish Tank, 2017
Five videos, 1 minute eachAssociated Events

Find out more

The Art History of Thomas Bock
Tuesday 12 December, 6–7pm – £3
Booking essential
Join Jane Stewart, Principal Curator at theTasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, andTrawlwoolway artist Julie Gough for papers
and discussion on the art history and legacyof Thomas Bock.

Visit the Resource Room where you can finda selection of books, audio and film.

Van Diemen’s Land
Wednesday 24 January 2018, 6–8pm – FREE
The Last Confession of Alexander Pearce
Wednesday 7 February 2018, 6-8pm – FREE
Booking essential
Ikon has programmed a series of film nights
to coincide with the Thomas Bock andEdmund Clark exhibitions. This starts witha screening of Van Diemen’s Land (2009),
the story of Alexander Pearce, one ofAustralia’s most notorious convicts. Thomas
Bock sketched Pearce before and after his
execution in 1824 and these portraits feature
in Ikon’s exhibition. See Ikon’s website forfurther screenings.
Pinhole Portraits
Tuesday 20 February 2018, 1–4pm
Thursday 22 February 2018, 1–4pm£4 per childBooking essential
Join us during half-term holidays for anafternoon with artist Jo Gane as we makepinhole cameras from recycled materials.
Inspired by our current exhibitions take andprocess your own images out and about inthe galleries. This workshop is suitable forchildren over 7 accompanied by an adult.
When booking please indicate children’s ages.
In the Frame
Wednesday 7 March 2018, 6–8pm – £5
Steelhouse Lane, Birmingham B4 6NW
Booking essential
Photographic historian Pete Jamesdiscusses the early history of photography
in Birmingham, with reference to its use asa means of surveillance by the Birmingham
Police Force in the nineteenth century, andin relation to Edmund Clark’s exhibition atIkon.

If you have any questions about theexhibition please ask the Information
Assistants in the gallery.
How to bookBook online at ikon-gallery.org or call us on
0121 248 0708. All events take place at Ikon
Gallery unless otherwise stated.
Stay in touch
Subscribe to our e-bulletin atikon-gallery.org and find us onikongallery
Ikon Gallery
Brindleyplace, Birmingham b1 2hs
0121 248 0708
ikon-gallery.org
Open Tuesday – Sundayand Bank Holiday Mondays, 11am–5pm
Free entry, donations welcome
Exhibition supporters
The Thomas Bock exhibition is supportedby the Australian Government throughthe Australian Cultural Diplomacy Grants
Program of the Department of Foreign
Affairs and Trade, the Gordon DarlingFoundation, the John Feeney Charitable
Trust, the Owen Family Trust, and a
Jonathan Ruffer Curatorial Research Grant
from Art Fund. Edmund Clark, Artist-inResidence at HMP Grendon, is supported by
the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable
Trust.

Printed on recycled paper.
Ikon Gallery Limited trading as Ikon.
Registered charity no. 528892.

Exhibition GuideThomas Bock
6 December 2017 – 11 March 2018
First Floor Galleries
Ikon presents the first UK exhibition
dedicated to the work of convict artist
Thomas Bock (c.1793–1855). Comprisinga selection of drawings, paintings andphotographs, it demonstrates not only
Bock’s technical skill, but also his sensitivity
to a wide range of subject matter.
Bock was one of the most important artists
working in Australia during the colonialyears. Trained in Birmingham as an engraver
and miniature painter, in 1823 he was foundguilty of “administering concoctions ofcertain herbs ... with the intent to cause
miscarriage”. Sentenced to transportation forfourteen years, he arrived in Van Diemen’sLand (now Tasmania) where he was quicklypressed into service engraving bank notes.
An early commission was a number ofportraits of captured bushrangers, before
and after execution by hanging, including thenotorious cannibal Alexander Pearce.
In a short space of time, Bock’s life wasturned upside down. Once a respectedartisan in his early twenties, with a good
address in a booming industrial town (24Great Charles Street, Birmingham), he now
found himself at the edge of the known
world in the company of compatriots who
were as desperate as they were depraved.
There are no surviving diaries that document
his personal journey. However, Bock’s artistic
output on arrival, through conditional andabsolute pardons until his death – marked
by an obituary that described him as “anartist of a very high order” – is a rich seam ofobservation, at once subtle and astonishing.
Most significant in this respect is Bock’s
series of portraits of Tasmanian Indigenouspeople, commissioned by George Augustus

Robinson (1791–1866), now in The British
Museum. His drawing throughout is fine andthe likenesses probably very true, and having
them at the heart of this exhibition conveys
the tragedies suffered by the Indigenous
people through the British colonisation ofAustralia. The sitters – including Trukanini(c.1812–76) and her husband Wurati (c.1784–1842) – have a demeanour that conveys bothpride and despair, thus suggesting that Bock,being marginalised himself, closely identifiedwith them.
In the 1830s, Hobart Town flourished asa cultural place, with Bock establishing aliving as an artist alongside fellow convicts
William Buelow Gould (1801–53) and Thomas
Griffiths Wainewright (1794–1847). Bock wascommissioned to portray British colonists,
usually government officials, wealthy
farmers, businessmen and their families. He
advertised himself as a “portrait painter”,
but it is in his drawings (esp. crayon, chalkand/or gouache) that we see an evocative
liveliness. The sketches he made in hisstudio or at home, often of his family, andsometimes outdoors, are like pieces in a
jigsaw of social history. Another fascinatingside to Bock’s artistic practice is revealed in
his life drawing, a number of nude studies
that are as tender as they are well observed,
likely of his second wife Mary Ann (1818–98)
with whom he had five children. This was
equivalent in size to the family Bock had left
behind of which all members had died by
1845 – perhaps as an indirect consequence of
his conviction.
This exhibition also includes somedaguerreotypes by Bock – tiny mechanicalimages in silver plate, mounted and glazedin cases – depicting the kinds of people
that he would have otherwise drawn orpainted. They provide further evidence of his
openness to new experience, incorporating it
into his existing practice.
It is interesting to speculate on what might
have happened to Bock had he remainedin Birmingham. Tasmania afforded him
recognition within his field, and the bodyof work by him that survives is remarkable
not only for its inherent quality, but also thelight it shines on the early years of a penal