Angletwich, 2020
Brighton CCA
For this major new commission with Brighton CCA, Brooks has expanded the scope of his work to
present this suite of paintings within a sculptural installation for the first time. The title of the show,
Angletwich, takes its name from a Devonshire dialect term for a worm used in fishing bait, but has
evolved to describe a fast moving creature or child. It speaks to the frenetic layering of people and
activity within the works as well as recurrent motifs of migration and the makeshift.
In weaving together this semi autobiographical narrative of queer and trans experience, Brooks has
turned to the rural South West England where he grew up and in particular its marginalised spaces
and communities. These new works centre on a series of rural archetypes; from the livestock fair
and the post office, to a lonely bus stop, generating a simultaneous sense of familiarity and isolation.
Each work in the exhibition is part of a wider whole; depicting characters, scenes and places which
together develop a critical narrative of place and queer experience in Britain. The installation mirrors
the environments found within the work, creating a dramatic context to more closely connect the
world of Brooks’ painting with the experience of encountering them.
Individually and as a group, the works articulate a powerful dichotomy between frenetic bouts of
activity and a kind of stasis. Farmers, market stall sellers, drivers and council workers are layered
up, surrounded by a chaotic jumble of vernacular rural materiality, waste and architecture; swirls of
rubber tyres, broken chairs, fires, blocked sewers and falling telegraph poles. These images, filled
with such latent dramatic narrative, are also shot through with a sense of slow time, of waiting as
life stalls or perhaps continues elsewhere. As Brooks comments of this series ‘I mostly painted
people looking exhausted and hypervigilant, always searching for something’.
How might it be possible to feel so acutely a sense of belonging and dislocation? The presence and
absence of community and concepts of care, informed by Brooks’ experience as a queer and trans
person who grew up in the countryside is at the heart of this narrative; questioning perceptions
based on assumption and received understanding over direct experience.
Thinking this through within the work, Brooks makes a distinction between what is familiar and what is
understood, between the idea of a life and a lived experience. In this way the works give us both an
unsentimental view of contemporary rural life and the case for more careful approach to the people
and places that surround us.
The Daily Winds Tourist Information Centre
In the North Gallery is the Daily Winds Tourist Office. Over the summer, Brooks and Programme
Producer Polly Wright, invited a group to share thoughts and experiences of the rural, through
Daily Winds, a bi monthly community newsletter. These conversations and contributions have
come together within a fictionalized tourist office presenting artworks and ephemera, distributing
information, and hosting socially distanced events.
The space and public programme offer visitors the opportunity to both explore their own perception of
the rural and the locality of Brighton, as well as encounter alternative understandings of rural life via
talks, workshops, texts, films and performance.
Photos by Rob Harris