The Brick

Created specially to coincide with the Almost Nothing but Blue Ground exhibition at Forma. The print takes its name, The Brick, from the term the immediate area around the old Bricklayers Arms (1844-1963) pub was known as. The pub is a place of socialising, rest and community which is particularly important to this area with its history of pilgrimage. The print sees an image of the Bricklayers Arms placed within a network of Melianthus Major and Kniphofia ‘red popsicle’. Both species, selected for their medicinal benefits, were collected from the Forma rooftop garden. The organic matter forms a network that could be perceived as a community of people where knowledge, history and stories are shared.

Preorder - Editions will ship from the opening of the exhibition at FormaHQ on 5 April 2024.

Tom Pope works in performance and photography. Play is at the core of his practice; it is both subject matter for his works but also embedded in how he utilises the photographic medium. In 2011 he won the Deutsche Bank Artist Award for the project Time Bound. Recent projects include One Square Club, at Frieze Art Fair Los Angeles, a performance work and the world’s most exclusive private members club; Art Workout an online exercise video and participatory performance commissioned for Frieze New York online; and Terminating Martin Parr, a live performance where he destroyed 17 Martin Parr photographs. Pope has work in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, National Museum of Wales as well as various private collections. Pope lives and works in Hastings.

Matthew Benington is an artist specialising in printmaking and photography, working with themes of collective memory, gender, and land ownership. Notable projects include Hide: The Apocryphal Archive, an immersive folly lined with etchings of his own displaced family members and Hide, a sculpture set within the permanent collection of Tremenheere sculpture garden. Object to Image is a series of large-scale installation of images within architectural folly’s. Ideas about ruination, public monuments, and the repurposing of former industrial spaces inform his curatorial work with Unstable Monuments, ACE, Truro, 2016 and Unstable Monuments Bristol, a residency and exhibition in 2022. Matthew lives in Norwich and runs Year 2 of the BA HONS Fine Art at Norwich University of the Arts.