Ollie Harrop

Front page of arts mag Peel:

A lovely review of the show Two Peacocks can be found in Peel. Copy of the review relating to my work in the show below.

After having pinched ourselves to remind us that we are in fact in a gallery we are met with a vibrant collaborative installation in the form of a Department Store, instigated by John Walter, who, at times, seems more of a ringmaster than a curator. Deidre Barlow, a train coursing ‘round a railway set and a pink slide that doubles as a tongue extending from a gaping cartoon mouth welcome us into the staged sculptural tableau that is Two Peacocks.

The work of the 12 artists on display overlap and spill out making it difficult to distinguish where one artists work ends and another begins. For example, Ollie Harrop’s to-scale photographs of Ghanian walls onto which paintings by John Walter are superimposed, in front of which are placed artificial flowers whose shadows merge with those of fauna present in the original image.

Within this co-mingling of fiction and reality on one wall is inscribed the number of a store to let; one imagines dialing this number and that someone at the other end would pick up. Never was there a clearer demonstration of ‘punctum’ a phrase coined by Barthes in 1980 to describe a detail that establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within it or, in the case of Harrop, an exquisite penetration of the façade.