Exhibition: Expectations of the Past

This exhibition of new and recent work by artist Louise Weir, takes visitors on an investigative journey of memory, identity and loss informed by Charles Dickens’s classic novel, Great Expectations.

In her work, Weir has created an emotional landscape as well as a physical one. Elements fragment, reappear and echo to create a mysterious place where the stories and characters of Great Expectations and the artist's personal memories overlap, meet and converse.

Location plays a fundamental part in the body of work as she repeatedly visited places from the novel in Kent and London as well as sites around her childhood home in North West of England. At each place, Weir collected new items to draw with, such as grasses, seed-pods, flowers, feathers, earth and discarded items particular to that space. Using water from streams she mixed mud with paint, letting rain fall on the artwork, pressing flowers and printing from them. The sketchbooks and drawings on display demonstrate Weir's unique creative process, and are exhibited alongside digital prints and poems.

Weir is an artist, illustrator and lecturer on the Illustration course at Southampton Solent University. She lives in Walthamstow with her family and works in her studio next to London Fields in the East End of London.