LONDON.- The work of Bryony Rose takes inspiration from fleeting, often banal, personal memories, that are expanded and elaborated upon to create eerie cultural narratives. In this her first solo exhibition with Cooke Latham, Rose creates numerous ceramic tiled panels in which streetlamps and snowflakes create a dizzying repeated motif. Down the centre of the gallery runs a ‘motorway’ and ‘overpass’ made from artist designed tables, which in turn are scattered with ceramic pigeons and cars. The installation pays homage to the modernist decorative heritage of Glasgow and specifically the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, but the nineties can also be traced in the work, a nod to the legacy of Ikea and flatpack Skandi modernism.

Rose is drawn to the inherent familiarity of the tile as a form, its utilitarianism and domesticity. Rather than self-contained vignettes the tiled panels speak to each other across the gallery, they are purposefully atmospheric, even emotional. Through the exhibition the ‘enveloping, stickiness of snow’ is explored. The viewer is reminded of the intense solitude that can be experienced within an urban centre as snow falls; streetlights and cars indicating life but seen at a degree of cocooned remove.

In science fiction the motorway has often been used as a literary tool that represents both connection and alienation. In Concrete Island, JG Ballard’s protagonist an architect Robert Maitland, crashes his Jaguar onto a neglected, overgrown median strip between three motorways, becoming marooned in a modern, dystopian Robinson Crusoe scenario. The book is both a reflection on the modern world roaring above him (and unable to see him) and Maitland’s own journey into his own subconscious. Night Snow by the M8 is a far gentler meditation on the motorway however it probes the same concepts of urban inclusion and remove. Rose describes herself as drawn to the inherent eeriness that can be pulled from mundane memories to reveal ‘a local folk horror of sorts’. To enter the gallery is to enter this world.

Snow light on the M8 is a body of work which draws on a loose memory I have of
walking over the motorway at dusk in Glasgow as snow is covering the city. There is
no-one else around – sound has become thick and the air is weighted.

--Bryony Rose, 2025