SW-based Artist Commission Spike Island, Flo Brooks
Flo Brooks (b. 1987) is an artist based in West Cornwall. He works across painting, collage, publication, installation and social practice. Merging autobiography with fiction, Brooks’ works coalesce around ideas of selfhood, belonging and temporality, most often taking form in densely layered acrylic paintings that for him act as a kind of repository for complex feeling, memory and social and political histories.
Recent solo exhibitions include: Be tru to your rec, Project Native Informant, London, 2022; Angletwich, Brighton CCA, which travelled to Tramway, Glasgow, 2020 – 2021, and Scrubbers, Project Native Informant, London, 2018. Group exhibitions include Bodies in space, MIRROR, Plymouth, 2022, SEEN, Newlyn Art gallery and The Exchange, Cornwall, 2022, Beano: The Art of breaking the rules, Somerset House, London, 2022, and Kiss my genders, Hayward gallery, London, 2019.
Harmonycrumb includes seven acrylic paintings appliqued onto found fabric, and six assemblages composed of lino flooring cutouts and handmade objects. Together, these works explore speculative entanglements between Brooks’ own life and the experiences of different historical figures, including military leader Joan of Arc (1412-31), ‘female husband’ Charles Hamilton (1721-46), and physician Michael Dillon/Lobzang Jivaka (1915-62).