Hamish Pearch, « On a Day Like This », Paris

« The city feels volcanic today; winds from distant lands have turned the sky a burnt umber. Vesuvius and Silvertown, Pompeii and Poplar. Clouds of silver smoke rise from chimneys, and yet the sky remains a furnace. The ground is restless, tectonic plates shifting over one another like flayed cardboard boxes on lino flooring. The air is charged; it smells like scorched rubber and fermented hops.

On a day like this, a sense of apocalypse looms over London, stunning it to near silence. The only sound comes from inside the factories, where conveyor belts that once trudged the products of labour now reveal artefacts of the apocalypse. A man, cowering, covered in ash. Detritus dredged from the Thames – fossilized ammonites and forgotten amenities. Junked cars, junk food, space junk. An ear cavity. A barn, already turned to charcoal. A sleeping kitten. Objects moving along the horizontal path to obsolescence.

Because those tectonic plates have opened up, ready to swallow the city and its millennia of humanity one trinket at a time. That which isn’t turned to cinders is fossilized, future tankards of oil. What’s surprising is how banal it all seems. We knew it was coming all along, and so we hopped on the conveyor belt. »

– William Rees

Hamish Pearch (b. 1993, London, UK) is currently studying at the Royal Academy Schools, recent exhibitions include a two person show with Ana Prata at Kupfer in London (2018), Go, Soft Opening, London (2018), New Relics, Thames-side Studios, London, (2018), Premiums, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2018)„ Addams Outtakes, Roaming Projects, London (2017), Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (co-curated and exhibited in with William Rees), J Hammond Projects, London (2018), Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Primary, Nottingham and ICA, London (2015). This will be Hamish’s first solo show with Sans titre (2016), after exhibiting at Material Art Fair in Mexico in 2018 and ‘Le Laboratoire’ in Marseille in 2017.