+447535958939
barnabywessell@gmail.com
2025
2024
2023
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Sketchbooks
About
+447535958939
barnabywessell@gmail.com
2025
2024
2023
Select perfomance and projects
Sketchbooks
About
‘Tomb Maps’ solo show at the Lab Gallery, 2026, Glasgow
https://thelabgallerystow.cargo.site/gallery-2026 - website link to Lab gallery!
This was just the best possible start to the year, I’ve got so many starting poitns from this show that it’s hard to choose where to gop next. Do I experiment with the strange viewing options of CRT or sterescopic viewers? Or take negative space printing for a spin. I actually think I’ve ended up really running away from some of the starting points out of confusion at their number, but I do see myself goping back hopefully...
“Tomb Maps”
21st September - 25th September
Review by Meg Voce
@meg_ggii
‘The small object felt heavy and cool in his palm. From what he’d glimpsed between his normal conversations on Norfolk parishes and the role of the English church in Egypt—it might have been a beetle of some kind. If it was, he knew the type, having seen similar artifacts in the museum back home: a jewel of topaz. The thing now was for the Bishop Badger to extract himself before suspicion was aroused…’
Barnaby Wessell, Tomb Maps, text
In Tomb Maps, his solo exhibition at the LAB Gallery, Barnaby Wessell is thinking about the situation and recurrence of the tomb shape as image, motif and topographical layout. It is both an image with a function towards a physical orientation as well as a developing visual language that the artist has taken up and attempted to articulate through his practice.
Wessell sees the exhibition as “starting with the story of my great great grandad’s supposed attendance at some ‘official opening/unveiling event’ of Tutenkhamen’s tomb… At the opening he took a beetle. Whether it was a jewel or a relic or a real beetle we do not know. It went missing from Granny Ro’s attic thirty years ago…”
If, then, there is a capacity for these maps to provide orientation, then perhaps there is also an opportunity for disorientation—an opportunity to get lost in this floating landscape. In An Artist of The Floating World, Kazou Ishigura describes the power and moral consequence of retrospective. There comes a time when the artist must confront the position of their own responsibility, give in to the inherent fluidity and precariousness of human memory and confront the moral and ethical responsibility of artistic practice. Suspended somewhere between fiction and reality, Wessell positions objects and transcriptions which are attempting to understand a history—to find a language to move through events which are not fixed or certain. As in Ishigura’s writing, fluidity appears as something palpable within the exhibition space.
The artist’s familial history is being mined through the process of bringing this exhibition together. Processes of excavating and playfulness feel like they are only a small part of what we can also think about as another form of archeological investigation. Across writing, printmaking, drawing, sculpture and video there is an interaction between the encyclopedic, egyptological and the gallery (compressed archive) space. This interaction is extended to the viewer in the form of an invitation. Wessell invites us to use this archived moment that they have brought to the fore, mined from a personal narrative thread that does not feel certain or concrete. The details and accuracy of this retelling are under scrutiny and subject to becoming the object on display in a way that echoes, interestingly, the ways in which Tutenkhamen’s tomb has been made subject of the museological structure since 1926, questioning what it means to dig (both literally and figuratively) into the past again and again, attempting to unearth something concrete, something to help nail down this floating world.
The ethicality of these repeated desecrations could be applied to this simultaneous investigation into memory—a desire to resolve uncertainty, find a neat and universally agreed upon narrative and call it truth. The impulse to never let history lie quietly.
Wessell’s great great grandfather is not seen in the exhibition itself. At least not in a visual or pictorial form. Instead we see this mysterious character fleshed out through a written narrative which threads through and behind the work of the exhibition. We see this blurry figure through the historical situation that is being shown to us, this event that he may or may not have witnessed, through these artworks which appear as quiet artifacts and fragments. He is a spectre in association with this invented egyptological material. We are left wondering if his finger prints are all over everything, or in fact, nowhere. The topography of the tomb is mapped, additionally, on top of this present-absence.
Objects anchor the curatorial decisions that have produced the space. The wooden stool and drawers (from some long departed bureau perhaps) form framing devices and feel like they also exist, naturally, in this archival context and setting. These framing devices exhibit their own traces of a historical memory and presence. They have beared witness too. In the mysterious scuff marks, unexplainable abbreviations, words and numbers, scrawled like an enigmatic code in black sharpie along thin edges. Worn down wooden corners, bleached and chipped, further inscribe an unknowable experience. Salvaged with purposeful intent, these objects came from the imagined archive space and now find themselves in another one.
A warm yellow light hangs from the ceiling, casting, quietly, an intimate glow across the three walls of the LAB Gallery, making it feel far removed from the white cube. It feels bunker-like, the walls somehow closer, as if pushing in on themselves. The space appears as if underground—far removed from the passage of time and the world outside of it; as if itself were a tomb.