Exhibition: Knots: Jonny Briggs x Burgh House

An experimental site-specific exhibition of new work by young British artist, Jonny Briggs.

Knots features multi-media interventions, interacting with the exterior and interior of Burgh House, encouraging visitors to reinterpret their surroundings and reconsider roles of familiar objects. Surreal, staged photographs and sculpture will be presented overtly and covertly in dialogue with the museum collection and located throughout the House and garden in a game of hide-and-seek.

Working collaboratively with a contemporary artist for the first time will see Burgh House’s Marie Louise von Motesiczky Gallery transformed into a dazzling cage-like playpen as Briggs attempts to deconstruct his past and reconstruct it - in the context of another home. Reflecting not only on Briggs’s own familiar familial history within a pine forest in rural England, but also on the human history of Burgh House, this exhibition of contrasts and surprises will include limbs bursting through photographs, absurdly shaped shoes, animatronic sock puppets that speak to visitors, and masks that close around Briggs’s body, restricting his movement.

In generating new perspectives on Burgh House and its collection, the exhibition connects with Hampstead’s significant place within the developmental history of psychoanalysis and Surrealism, taking its title from psychiatrist and mental health campaigner, R.D. Laing’s 1970 book of collected poetry.