“‘Schudde, hovel, or swyne kote, or howse of sympyl hyllynge to kepe yn beestys’.
The shed or hovel is a house fit for beasts, and millions of spiders would agree.”
- 15th Century Dictionary
Berntson Bhattacharjee is pleased to announce the group exhibition, The Shed. Toying with the perverse, hidden desires, and intimate experiences, Szabolcs Bozo, Joe Fox, Cece Philips, Olivia Sterling, Katy Stubbs, Julia Thompson, and Willowfuck find each other in The Shed. Bringing together seven artists whose practices transform this unassuming structure into a site of introspection, narrative, and subversion, each explores its symbolic potential in distinct and unexpected ways.
Working across a variety of mediums including paper, canvas, and sculpture, the artists present a new body of work housed within a constructed shed situated at the end of an uneven path at the back of the gallery. This path offers the viewer a moment of quiet reflection before entering the structure, where the works reveal secrets and challenge the boundaries of ordinary spectatorship. Inside the shed, the experience becomes personal and introspective, inviting close engagement with the material and conceptual layers of the work. A selection of larger scale pieces by the artists will be displayed downstairs, offering a broader context to the installation above.
Tracing back to the most rudimentary architectural origins, the simple formation of a shed references the most basic form of shelter. From refuge to storage, the shed has become an extension of a human’s innate desire to collect and accumulate, creating a space to harbour unwanted objects, tools, and peculiar, nostalgic items. The shed becomes more than just a container of things, but a space of pondering when no one’s watching, inviting those to confront the parts of themselves otherwise ignored.
Who are you in The Shed?
With a rich cultural history, artists such as Cornelia Parker, and Rachel Whiteread DBE have been known to embrace the conceptual vessel of the shed. Parker’s Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) reconstructs the remains of an exploded garden shed she commissioned the British Army to destroy. Parker’s use of the shed works to transform the understanding of the everyday, challenging institutional constructs, and dismantling ‘the typical’ both literally and figuratively. Whiteread’s Detached I, Detached II, and Detached III (2012), concrete and steel casts of the interiors of sheds, invert the structure’s familiar function by turning personal spaces into solid, impenetrable monuments, preserving the traces of interior life while denying entry and compelling the viewer to observe without the possibility of entering. Alternatively, Do Ho Suh’s current exhibition Walk The House at the Tate Modern, uses the concept of simple structures on a larger scale, exploring fabric memorialization of space and time. These artists elevate humble architecture beyond its utilitarian origins, using it as a powerful metaphor for memory and identity.
Bound by the shed’s quiet visage, the artists in Berntson Bhattacharjee’s exhibition gather in a space where the hidden becomes seen and the ordinary turns uncanny. In their hands, the shed is not just shelter but a threshold between public and private, memory and myth, humour and haunting, where the inner self is no longer concealed, but set free.
