SKETCHES FOR PURGATORY

BLACKSOUND 2025

Sketches for Purgatory continues Bishop’s long-standing engagement with landscape and trauma, now refracted through a period of rupture, reckoning, and self-confrontation. Six years on from Monuments to Thieves, these works emerge from the uneasy terrain of mental strain, and personal transformation. What once seemed external…….ruin, erosion, displacement has become internalised, tangled with identity, memory, and creative process.

The exhibition draws heavily from the raw aesthetics and sensibilities of underground experimental and industrial music scenes that have shaped Bishop’s visual and sonic vocabulary over decades. Here, graphic noise bleeds into scratched surfaces; sonic tension is echoed in fractured structures and unstable forms. The influence is not symbolic it is structural.

Bringing together old and new works, Sketches for Purgatory spans photography, printmaking, paste-ups, illustration, and concrete-cast maquettes. Found organic materials and abject sculptural assemblages scatter across the space like remnants of failed rituals or half-buried warnings. Dust, stains, and visible marks are not imperfections but part of the syntax, proof of process, survival, and decay.

The works speak not of resolution, but of endurance: a fraught, ongoing negotiation between the human and non human - one that remains dark, unresolved, and marked by friction. Sketches for Purgatory is a map of that terrain, drawn in fragments and noise, traced through loss, and held together by the will to keep making through the wreckage.