Wenyon & Gamble

Susan Gamble and Michael Wenyon have collaborated since 1983. They are UNESCO Laureates, awarded in 1993, for their work with new technology.

The pair combine differing backgrounds in art and science.

Susan Gamble has degrees in Fine Art, from Goldsmiths’ College, London, and in the History of Science, from Cambridge University, while Michael Wenyon studied Physics at Bristol University and Optics at Imperial College, London.

Their works are in collections such as The Victoria & Albert Museum; the M.I.T. Collection, Boston; the National Portrait Gallery and the National Academies of Science, Washington DC, and have been exhibited internationally, including shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Liverpool, Mito Art Tower, Japan. Their work was last exhibited in London at The Photographers Gallery in 1993.

In this show the artists muse on the photographic practice and organic material: coal and silver.

‘Silver Before Photography’ is a hologram of English silverware manufactured before the invention of photography. The hologram presents the illusion of antique spoons and ladles, resting on a table.

Holography was possibly the last analogue photographic process to use silver salts. Here the twentieth-century medium provides a window onto silver objects from an age before photography.

For this exhibit the artists have selected a nineteenth-century stereo Daguerreotype from the Jonathan Ross collection of a family grouped around a table, to allude to the domestic objects, scenes and processes that continue over time. The artists employ different media ––holograms and daguerreotypes––to reflect on the past and the sentimental lure of objects as they fade into history.