In their second solo exhibition with Project Native Informant, Cornwall-based British artist Flo Brooks (b. 1987) presents a new series of paintings and, for the first time, collages. Continuing the artist’s previous investigations into the aesthetics and politics of space in a climate of increasing commercialization and policing, these new works pivot around the archetype of the recreation ground, and the different ways that people make use of these communal spaces. Each work is part of a wider whole, depicting characters and scenes that together develop a critical narrative of public space and what it means to belong.

Assembled from a diverse array of imagery, including archival material, photographs taken by the artist and found ephemera, the paintings are built up like collages. Each composition is formed around a particular event or set of activities encountered on the recreation ground. Referencing the artist’s experiences taken from a site visible from their studio in Cornwall, Be tru to your rec explores the incongruities and absurdities of contemporary life in flux.

In The bramble, 2022, a wearied parent waits as a child picks blackberries, below them a dormouse clambers away out of reach. A LGBTQ+ Pride event is framed between a COVID 19 testing site and a policeman, peering out over a hedge in Hold me hold my placard, 2022. Other figures congregate around marquees and kiosks, their faces mask-like, out of sync. The works are installed on a site specific wall painting rendered in varying shades of beige. The hues specifically chosen by the artist to evoke the characteristic gazebos that populate the transient events depicted, where people shield under these often faded and degraded structures. Together these intimate descriptions act as a wider metaphor for the fragility of our ecologies, under countless social, environmental and economic challenges of recent years. Our longings to gather together in these public spaces, and our often-thwarted attempts at truly connecting within them.

For the first time, Brooks presents a series of framed collages. While the artist has previously created them specifically for publication, these new wall works converse with the paintings in more abstract forms. Images of park furniture, boundary markers and archival images of LGBTQ+ figures assemble around flat areas of painted colour. Emerging from time spent on Clapham Common, and exploring its LGBTQ+ histories, the collages make reference to both specific individuals and events gathered in the space over the last 50 years, as well as present- day methods of policing and park management witnessed on the site. In The Common (pink), 2022, Divine, the American drag queen, actor, singer, and one of the hosts for Andrew Logan’s 1978 Alternative Miss World held on Clapham Common, poses on top of a park heritage sign, underneath her is an image of a bin taped with thick fluorescent tape. Used by the commons management team to both limit litter and reduce environmental impact, its juxtaposition for the artist, is there to remind us of the ways that queer spaces continue to be targeted under wider sanitization processes that seek to “clean up” parks and commons and protect property.

Following the artist’s recent institutional exhibition Angletwich, which travelled from CCA Brighton to Tramway Glasgow in 2020 - 2021, Brooks will present their first public art project in Clapham launching in July 2022 that has been commissioned by Studio Voltaire. Upcoming for the artist is a solo exhibition at Spike Island, Bristol that will open in 2023.