+447535958939
barnabywessell@gmail.com
2025
2024
2023
Select perfomance and projects
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.
The Wanderer Dependant, 2025, Bolsena, Italy
Map of the ‘Wanderer Dependant’s’ route around the lake Bolsena, ink on paper, 2025 -->
Below drawings made during the walk of the ‘Wanderer Dependant’ from the campsite of the Fat Germans to Bolsena. \/
This was my first Journey as the ‘Wanderer Dependant’ who has lived in my head, somewhat unchanged since 2024. He’s a revolutionary: trespassing across land, ignoring private property - infringes upon our rights to roam. Yet he’s also trapped in the past, walking from one ancient monument to the next (iron age hillforts, the via francigena, stone circles, long barrows) attaching ritualistic importance to these sites and vainly trying to inflate his own meaning through association to such monuments. A speculative myth weaving he extends to each object or experience he finds on his travels (a traffic cone becomes a cylinder for captured souls, or a tractor a terrible monster). For me as the artist, he is an opportunity too to give in to the voices of the land around me. To perform him is a deep listening: to the road I’m on, the sights sounds and feelings that arise from the journey and then an attemot to embody these into the charachter I play. Doing this first performance in Italy where I was unable to speak the language, but on the familiar 900 year old Via Francigena Pilgramige route was an effective “in” because I had ritualistic purpose and history behind the path I walked alongside a poor understanding of the specific region leaving room for speculation while maintaining wieight of meaning behind it.
Filo Ancantilado (The Fight), 2025, Sighthill park, Glasgow
Filo Anacantilado (The Fight) is a joint performance made by Barnaby Wessell and Lucas Fernandez in Glasgow, May 2025. The fight between two strange creatures speaking in tounges rises in intensity and violence across 5 rounds until one of the two is slain. Surreal and entertaining the hope is the audience might eventually feel peturbed by what they witness and uncomfortable with the potential good humour they found in it previously. Made in response to the growing violence of ICE raids in Trump’s America it’s both spectacle and fear made from the distant, disconnected vantage point of scotland with one of the performers and artists never having even left europe at time of creation it naturally becomes a high fantasy as to what this is. Emulating the process we all go through processising the overwhelm of information and news we are fed/read - that is making up what the hell it means.
Cave studies, 2025, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn
(after le grotto and the left hand of darkness) , blue ink on paper, 2024
Crow, 2025
Wandering Studio, 2025, Brooklyn
Modern Wayfaring, Ongoing
Modern wayfaring is sitting on the bus between London and Bristol on the way back from your visa appointment. The NX 040 and it’s 7 oclock so it’s full and your 6 pound 50 is seeming not so worth it stuck next to the nervous man in crisis, who smells quite a bit. You’d like to talk to him see if you can help but you know your stuck next to each other for the next 3 and a half or 4 hours so you don’t. Because awkward silence is better than the unkown conversation of those potential hours. You have the window seat so you look out of it - seeing the horizon distort and shift, prying itself from the curve of the earth falling to the side of the road - along the double yellow line. The only consistant monemuments in modern wafaring are not towers, hills or churchtowers but the faces of the other travellers stony and impassive beneath headphones and flickering phone light. The new landmarks perhaps more impassive and unmoving than the old. You dont meet people as a modern wayfarer.
Static Puppets, 2025
Static puppets made at moments of emotional intensity from the last year. Often they do the thing i find so enchanting about puppets - become vessells for the bits of me I’d rather keep separate or purge.
Xmas Peformance, 2024, Stow Cafe, Glasgow
This was a performance for the exhibition: Interference which took place between the Glasgow School of Art and CalArts. I really wanted to break up the too cool for school thing I think, so I might of leaned a little too hard into the whimsey (an easy mistake) I rmeber being really ill when the performance happend, and everything feeling really quite intense as a result. It bit me with another bug - pouring my whole soul into being someone else and feeling how people reponded to me was formative for the direction of my work henceforth. The premise in this piece was to make the audience feel that mysterious things might begin to happen in the workld around them, and that the city could all just crumble away to reveal an ancient and unforgiving land beneath. I was a construction worker starting this process by building brigaddon and I think people bought it, at least I got lot’s of questions after the next chunk of performance.