Desmond Brett and Carl Rowe

Desmond Brett and Carl Rowe share a lot of things in common. We live in East Anglia. We are artist members of OUTPOST gallery in Norwich. We work at Norwich University of the Arts. We like teaching art. We like the art scene in the north of England. We like palaeontology and deep history. We like stews in winter and stews in summer. We make artworks. 

But it gets a bit tricky when we categorise our work. Desmond is a sculptor and Carl is a printmaker, but Desmond makes things that go on walls and Carl makes things using paint that sometimes go on the floor. The nomenclature suggests a direction and the material outcomes contradict it. And that is perhaps why it makes so much sense that we are showing together. Once the artworks are positioned within the gallery space, they establish their own dialogue with each other. Desmond’s rough-hewn angular and inverted things urge Carl’s flat and contradictory graphic things to occupy real space, and vice-versa. Empty bits of walls and floor in the gallery become terrain within which imagined hybrid artworks can wander. 

We didn’t give this exhibition a name. Although, at one point, it was accidentally called Bloc Project. And we like the thought of blocky things forming blocs of things, coagulations, strings, molecules, conglomerates. This all hints at the granular nature of matter and the fabulous wonder of forms that appear and disappear.