ASHES TO ASHES

VENUE

Asylum Chapel, Caroline Gardens, Asylum Rd, London SE15 2SQ

OPEN TO PUBLIC

15 - 19 December 2025, 10:00 - 17:00

PRIVATE VIEW

15 December 2025, 17:00 - 20:00

RSVP HERE

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

- The Book of Common Prayer (London: Edward Whitchurch, 1549)

Genesis 3:19. “… for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

- The Holy Bible, King James Version (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1769).

In Latin, malum means evil, and mālum means apple - two words, identical in form, divided only by the length of a vowel. From this fragile slip of sound was born the image of temptation itself that shattered innocence and made consciousness possible.

God has one single command - “not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” They disobeyed. The defiance of divine order is the first act of human independence - not a moral failure, but a moment of awakening. Through that act, Adam and Eve gained awareness - of good and evil, of themselves, of shame, of mortality, of desire, and death.

To live without death is to exist in stasis; to live knowing death is to create, love, and seek significance. Mortality is a gift rather than punishment. It is within a finite time that we learn to cherish and appreciate. The loss of immortality marks the birth of time and consciousness - the awareness of beginning and end, of memory, loss, and longing.

That awareness is what defines the human condition - and, symbolically, the origin of art, culture, and meaning-making.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust” - It is an acknowledgment of impermanence - that everything we build, feel, and become is destined to fade. Yet it is precisely in the face of this decay that art asserts its quiet defiance. To create is to resist the inevitable; to make is to extend one’s presence beyond disappearance.

As humans we long to be recognised. We want money, to buy time; fame, to confirm worth; thrill, to feel alive; stillness, to stop the ache of wanting. We want to belong and we resist being claimed. We want risk and we fear failure. We want safety and we crave escape. We want beauty and we are drawn to ruin. We want control and we hunger for surrender. We want truth yet we polish it until it shines like a lie. We chase feeling until exhaustion, then crave numbness as mercy. We want to live without limits and we want to be spared from consequence. We love, we labour, we destroy, we rebuild. We bargain with the self: a little more control, a little more surrender; a little more safety, a little more risk. We are all so different, yet so much alike. Every act - even the smallest gesture - is an attempt to negotiate with impermanence, to insist that something of us might remain, to make sense of the this overwhelming, charming and condemned world.

Art is where all these contradictions are allowed to exist at once. It is where hunger becomes language, where loss becomes image, where desire becomes form. It does not cancel impermanence; it renders it legible. It answers hunger with structure, solitude with address, chaos with rhythm. And so the work of art becomes a disciplined excess: intensity contained without being dulled, vulnerability framed without being disguised. It is confession and craft, impulse and edit. It speaks to the most basic human desires - not by preaching answers, but by staging encounters.

Set within the Asylum Chapel, the exhibition finds its form in a space that embodies this paradox of endurance and loss. The Chapel - a ruin that refuses silence - bears the imprint of devotion and decay, of tenderness that has outlasted its original purpose. Once a house of prayer, later left fractured and hollowed by time, it now shelters new forms of faith: memory, imagination, creation. Within its weathered walls, time folds inward, preserving traces of what was and nurturing the possibility of what may be. Winter, in this context, is not a season of absence but of unveiling. The Winter Edition invite artists whose works dwell within that fragile interval between loss and renewal - where material erodes into spirit, and gesture becomes prayer.

In this setting, the Asylum becomes both metaphor and refuge - a sanctuary not from madness, but from the noise of certainty. It is the safety of being oneself, unvarnished and unguarded; a place where imagination offers asylum from the world’s demand for coherence. Within these walls, creation becomes a kind of shelter - the preservation of childlike desire against the inevitability of decay.