Private View : Friday 12 June, 6-9pm, all welcome
Open : Saturday 11 – 27 June, Friday & Saturday, 11am - 4pm.

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Colin Robins :  People - Princess - Pigs

 

Princess Diana’s visit (1985) + the Cornish Quality Bacon factory (1983)

 

Diana, who was also then Duchess of Cornwall, visited Redruth in April 1985 for the purpose of opening a new residential housing facility for the elderly at Miner’s Court. The day was marked by bursts of heavy rain allied to a consistent and cold wind.  Many people lined the streets in the hope of seeing her as she was driven through the town. 

 

The Cornish Quality Bacon factory had been situated behind the Regal Cinema on the site of what is now the town’s Job Centre. The photographs show the stages that characterise the processes involved in industrial pig slaughtering. They are visual echoes of the same procedures as described in Upton Sinclair’s 1905 novel The Jungle, which focused on experiences of the Chicago stockyard killing floors. The methods Sinclair describes are exactly as they were enacted in the Redruth bacon factory. 

 

 

 

Ian Elliott :  Excerpts from The Gospel According to St Austell

 

Invited to AH by Colin Robins and presented in dialogue with his People – Princess – Pigs exhibition, Ian Elliott’s contribution comprises three interconnected fragments drawn from The Gospel According to St Austell—an extensive and evolving body of sculptural, two-dimensional, and literary work. 

 

The Gospel According to St Austell employs found objects and imagery (often of kitsch, touristic or other remnants of mass-produced populist culture). Objects and printed material have been adulterated, remodelled and combined to allow for new thematic and conceptual narratives to emerge.  This process of assemblage produces three-dimensional collages whose drifting chain of associations, counterpoints and alliances sidestep any dependence on rationality.

 

The works exhibited at AH reference Napoleon Bonaparte’s appearance in Plymouth Sound in 1815, an event reimagined in Jules Giradet’s large narrative painting Napoleon on Board the Bellerophon at Plymouth, 1890. This is one of the many threads in Elliott’s densely woven and Thomas Pynchon-like Gospel.

 

 

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Colin Robins

Robins has been making photographic work in and around Redruth since the early 1980s. In 1999 working from an improvised studio in a disused shop in he made a collection of portraits using a large format plate camera. Between 2024 and 2025 he produced a new series of large portraits once again using a plate camera and these too were shown at Auction House in 2025. He has recently completed a short photographic survey of Redruth residents’ living rooms. He is also a co-producer alongside Oliver Udy, of the Anthology of Rural Life project, a long-term photographic survey of rural communities across Europe.

 

 

Ian Elliott

Originally from Sheffield, Ian Elliott is an artist and musician based in mid-Cornwall. Elliott’s practice is diverse and encompasses assemblage, sculpture, collage, drawing and painting as well as writing. Recent exhibitions of his work have been determined by an interest in aligning the themes and nature of the work within non-gallery contexts. This has led to exhibitions in the Witchcraft Museum in Boscastle, a Masonic Lodge, the Holy Trinity Church in St Austell and a redundant commercial property in Mevagissey.

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