Colyer-Fergusson Gallery is delighted to be hosting Preludes (where you go, I go), a new exhibition by Kent-based visual artist, actor and illustrator Adam de Ville next month.

Adam’s new exhibition, created especially for Colyer-Fergusson, takes inspiration from Gavin Bryars’ piece, Sinking of the Titanic, in which the composer imagines what the music the band was playing as the ship sank might have sounded like as the band played during the sinking, and what happened to the music as it continued to reverberate in the water.

“I hope to carry this poetic notion through, imagining how the paint might react under water both physically and poetically,” Adam observes, “with the preludes being eye-witness accounts before, during and after, with the ‘after’ forming a prelude to history, to the passing of living memory and our continuing / changing ‘imagining’ of the event, like the music and paint, transformed by the depths of the ocean, of time.”

From Bach to Debussy, the prelude as a musical form has appealed to composers, both for its concision as well as for its imaginative potential; the iconic collection by Bach exploring equal temperament, or the evocative dreamscapes of Debussy’s two books of piano preludes, the prelude offers both discipline as well as imaginative possibilities; Adam’s exhibition explores both concepts, inspired by Bryars’ music. The hauntingly beautiful strains of Bryars’ moving piece find echo in Adam’s evocative images, which hover on the cusp of dissolving, disappearing.

From May to August this year, Adam was the Armchair Artist-in-Residence at the Beaney Museum in Canterbury, for which he also created Something Between Us, an instillation exploring the life of the physical book, funded by Canterbury Arts Council; he has also had exhibitions at the Stark Gallery and the Beaney Front Room. His illustrations accompanied the book Richmond Bigbottom, a fairy-tale for children published in 2015.

Find out more about Adam here, and about his public theatre / art installation work here. Preludes (where you go, I go) will be on display at Colyer-Fergusson Gallery on the University of Kent’s Canterbury campus from 24 September – 4 November; admission is free.