At Talbot Rice in Edinburgh, Glasgow-based artists Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich have released a carnivalesque cacophony
Into the perfectly proportioned interior of Talbot Rice’s neoclassical Georgian gallery, complete with stately ionic columns and rows of intricate cornicing, Glasgow-based artists Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich have released a carnivalesque cacophony. Outsized creatures, towering flowers and the resounding sound of ritual chants and workers’ songs make the cavernous space bustle with irreverent energy. Searching for a Change of Consciousness surveys the last decade of the duo’s collaborative practice, which draws on histories of industrial action and utopian imaginings to fashion performances that bring people together in public acts of celebratory resistance.
At the gallery’s entrance, a forked tongue droops from the gaping jaws of a giant snake lying on the wooden floor. Constructed from roughly stitched strips of red and black ripstop cotton, Serpent of Capitalism (2018) is the largest in a group of inflatable sculptures that fill the room. Taking up most of the left side of the space, it curls through obstructed archways with a menacing, if slightly ridiculous, presence. Puffed up by electric blowers, whose buzz is constant behind the overlapping audio tracks emanating from multiple monitors, most of these inflatables tower over the viewer. Easily stuffed into suitcases, they become ceremonial centrepieces in public processions organised by Walker & Bromwich around the world, often devised in collaboration with radical theatre troupes and community groups. Sheltered in a tent made of willow and black fabric, a film documents the Serpent’s outing at Roskilde music festival in 2018. Walker, leading the procession in a druidic gown, chants about reckless extraction as performers bang drums and shoulder the 35-metre snake past curious revellers, some of whom reach out to touch it as if it possesses a sacred, transformative power.
The oldest inflatable in the show, Love Cannon (2005), is a neutered phallic weapon. A bulging pink and purple flower mounted on wooden wheels, it has been part of processions in the uk, France and Indonesia, the last of which is shown in a film, An Act of Love (2024), on the gallery’s upper balcony. Devised in collaboration with Teater Tuturupa, the performance involved costumed dancers wielding giant petals and sharing food with passersby, exemplifying Walker & Bromwich’s cultivation of the carnivalesque to upend symbols of power and dissolve boundaries between observer and participant. In the gallery, Love Cannon is neighboured by a set of ‘rocket flowers’, inflatable missiles that bloom at their tip, which demarcate the Encampment of Eternal Hope (2012–ongoing), a gathering place for cross-cultural discussion on the climate emergency. These bloated parodies of military technology teeter on the edge of naivety in their flirtations with 1960s ‘flower power’ aesthetics, but their imposing ridiculousness and erotic overtones prime them for the kind of participatory jubilation they intend to provide outside the gallery.
The film Llechi A Llafur // Slate or State (2017), shown in another makeshift tent, relays the preparation for a procession organised in Bethesda, Wales. The town, home to many of the workers at a neighbouring slate quarry, was the site of one of the lengthiest strikes in British history, brought against the quarry’s aristocratic owner, Lord Penrhyn, occupant of nearby Penrhyn Castle, in 1900. In the film, the camera pans across the castle’s delicately carved wooden archways and dragon-headed lantern-holders as a woman’s voice states, “I know many people who would never go near Penrhyn castle”. Another interviewee explains that the Penrhyn fortune was built on slavery, the luscious interiors the result of years of exploitation. The inflatable constructed as part of this project looms ominously at the back of the gallery: a black bulbous shape mimicking the Talcen Mawr rock, visible in historical depictions of the quarry but destroyed in 1895. At once jagged and comical, it stands proudly incongruent to its neoclassical surroundings, casting a dark shadow over the interior’s exquisite craftsmanship and gesturing towards the suppressed histories obscured by such opulence.
Llechi A Llafur // Slate or State ends with a triumphant yet mournful march through the castle gates, accompanied by protest songs composed with local schoolchildren who had been asked to harness the century-old anger that still rippled through their community. The huge inflatable rock is carried on the shoulders of suited participants like an absurd hearse, a reminder that these playful performances, while hoping to provoke collective visions of improved futures, are firmly grounded in remembrance of past sacrifice. For all the joyful lightness that animates Walker & Bromwich’s practice, there is always a pressing weight at the centre of their projects.
Searching for a Change of Consciousness at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, through 31 May
From the May 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
