As It Happens, 2025
Cyanotype solution, debris, ephemera, graphite, ink, organic materials, mirrorboard, oil pastel, water-based paint, printed pages, paper, original colour photographs
4500cm × 3200cm in total

Installation views, Jeannie Avent Gallery, London, April 2025

This aesthetic mindfulness expands from the page and onto the wall in Sylee Gore’s As It Happens, an installation of cyanotype, collage and sculpture in conversation with the sestina.

Six columns of six, plus a coda, incorporating blossom, magnolia petals and peelings of birch bark collected from the street outside the gallery were interspersed with cyanotypes made using an eclectic mix of source materials – Gore’s own collages, archival photographs by William Talbot, and the 1680 printing of John Dryden’s “Preface to Ovid’s Epistles”.

Cyanotype is surely the perfect carrier for the ephemeral – Quink-blue photograms time-travelling from earliest photography, still fresh as a daisy, still fixing the quotidian in light.

Gore insists on getting closer still, attaching the actual blossom to the wall, and by doing so, refutes the illusion that we truly hold on to anything. It’s all a translation.

Her visual sestina has all the beats of her written poetry – pauses of space balancing with those exquisite hits of resonance and recognition.

All quotations taken from Claire Collinson’s exhibition review for Tears in the Fence, published 25th April 2026, available here: https://tearsinthefence.com/2025/04/25/nic-stringer-sylee-gore-the-main-part-is-gone-jeannie-avant-gallery-3-15-april-2025/