Diviners
4 – 27 September 2021

Diviners is a joint exhibition by Hermione Allsopp and Poppy Whatmore, presented at the invitation of Gallery DODO. Its title arose from the artists’ common interest in materials, spaces and the found object, as well as in artistic practices that allow for work to develop in organic and unforseen ways. To divine a thing is to intuit something, or to discover it, sometimes unexpectedly, from corollary factors. Both artists acknowledge and readily embrace the ways in which their work seems, at significant moments, to suggest its own path, key aspects frequently emerging only in the process of making. 

Independently, both have also found themselves interested in the function and materiality of the partition or divider – something playfully hinted at in the near-homonym offered by the exhibition’s title. Poppy Whatmore has reconstructed the flat packed internal dividers of IKEA magazine boxes, casting them as a series of large scale concrete panels. Recalling the formal geometries of modernist abstract painting, the gridded installation also echoes the modular frontage of the Phoenix building itself. Against the raw concrete of the DODO space, the office supplies of Phoenix’s past seem almost to have become absorbed into the fabric of the building.

Hermione Allsopp is interested in objects as the carriers of collective memory and meaning. Working sometimes with ceramics and building materials, a number of the works she is showing respond to the material traces of the DODO space’s previous use as a washroom. Observing the vestiges of two removed cubicles in DODO’s tiled floor, the artist has reconfigured an earlier work, Synthetic Echo, in which a partition screen framed graphic suspended cutouts of institutional vinyl flooring. As installed, the partition has gone the same way as the original washroom cubicles, and a single tracery of flooring hangs from a screw driven into the wall.

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