A new London show explores material magic with medieval melancholy

In ‘þe Sellokest Swyn’, which translates as ‘our most magnificent boar’, curator Jermaine Gallacher has brought together a group of artists united by their relationship to their medium. ‘They are all masters of their material,’ Gallacher says. ‘They understand scale, and aren’t trying to make their material do something that it doesn’t want to.’ The exhibition is staged at The Ragged School in London, and its grounding in the medieval and gothic comes from Gallacher’s interest in deconsecrated monasteries, and the proportions and practices associated with the period.

The show's title is a reference contributed by one of the artists, Ben Burgis, and is a quote from the 14th-century chivalric romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an Arthurian story written in verse.

Burgis is showing a series of oil paintings based on the decorative roof bosses of ambulatories within certain religious buildings: ‘You’ll be walking through the cloisters, and look up to see these tales, hagiography, pagan images, or biblical stories,’ he says. The bosses were painted in the 14th and 15th centuries, and because they are up high on the ceiling, they remain as rare examples of pre-Reformation art.

‘They are polychrome stone paintings [in full colour]. Some parts have been knocked off, like faces or limbs, but they are close to how they would have looked when they were originally made,’ Burgis tells me of those he studied. Painting mostly from life, he worked with the visual stories of the roof bosses; as a series, his abstract leaf sculptures, owls, and green men, ‘kind of produced themselves’, he says.

Drawing on ideas of the gothic and church interior architecture, artist and stonecarver Emma Sheridan is showing a winged font table for the exhibition. It’s the first piece of furniture she has made – having produced parts of stone tables on commission as part of her job – and she embraced the opportunity to ‘make something for the aesthetic pleasure of the object’. Although rooted in the gothic, Sheridan wanted to work away from the strict structure of a particular style, and ‘do it in a more free way. Make it more modern, and gilded in various golds.’

Miranda Keyes and Gala Colivet Dennison shared this approach, too, each embracing the principles of the exhibition in a way that complements their process of working instinctively with material. ‘Each piece of silver is separately forged, you bend it once, and that is how it wants to be,’ Colivet Dennison says. Her sculptural candlestick, which is both functional and unconventional, is intentionally heavy in weight and lightly gestural in form, as if the pieces of silver are intwined in a dance. The piece took form with The Ragged School in mind, and Keyes’ separate solo exhibition, ‘Tulips’, which opened at the venue in 2024, in particular. ‘As [the candlestick] came together, I was thinking about the way light behaves in the room,’ Dennison says. ‘I was inspired by how in Miranda’s work, there is a second element of shadow.’

As with the pieces in ‘Tulips’, Keyes’ goblet for ‘þe Sellokest Swyn’ struck a beautiful form as a sculpture and a reflection. ‘A lot of my work is in dialogue with the goblet in an almost arbitrary way, which is related not so much to a desire to make a cup, but the fact that it is an exercise [in material],’ Keyes says. ‘When it comes to objects, and specifically goblet-ware, the gothic means something much more compressed, more solid. I wanted to play with proportions, to have a very small form at the top and a thick, snaking stem. That kind of balance is not something I have done before.’

For Ralph Parks, the exhibition was an opportunity to embrace a new approach to scale, too. Rhine by Night is a set of two pieces of furniture, a cabinet – ‘of mediaeval proportions’, Gallacher says – and a hand-carved chair, inspired by those in a Romanesque church in Switzerland, and the idea of decontextualising religious imagery. While Parks’ practice is informed by research, making it is ‘the thing’ and he works ‘as intuitively as possible’. ‘I think it’s important to have beautiful things around you,’ Parks says. ‘It is the easiest way to make people care about things, by showing them that someone has cared enough about something to make it well.’

'þe Sellokest Swyn' is on view until 3 April at The Ragged School, 47 Union Street, London SE1 1SG