Local artist brings new exhibition to Wimbledon Museum
Local artist brings new exhibition to Wimbledon Museum
Alastair Gordon has captured the museum’s collection with highly detailed paintings
Photo: Artist Alastair Gordon by Ben Deakin
A forthcoming exhibition at Wimbledon Museum (6 February – 29 March) invites visitors to look again at the familiar, the forgotten and the quietly remarkable objects that shape the history of a place. Objects of Enchantment is a solo exhibition by the museum’s new artist-in-residence, Alastair Gordon, whose meticulously detailed paintings depict artefacts from the museum’s eclectic collection. Alastair explains: “The museum has this most fabulous collection, some of which dates back to the Roman period, all the way through to the suffragette movement and World War II. The hope is to share something of their story through art, perhaps with a new audience that wouldn’t necessarily come to the museum.
The idea behind the project is to show what happens to even the simplest of objects when they are placed on a plinth in a museum or featured in a painting. He says: “When an object goes into a museum, it becomes more than it originally was when it’s part of a display. Painting can do something similar. An everyday object is elevated when it becomes the subject of a piece of art.
There will be 15 works in total. “I’m trying to be as faithful as I can to the artefacts themselves,” Alastair says, “but it’s also about how I see them and how I relate to the people they belonged to.” One piece depicts the dress of Wimbledon philanthropist Miss Kezia Peache; Alastair has painted her jabot in intricate detail, capturing the delicate folds and lace textures, and the sense of presence that clothing retains long after its wearer has gone. Alongside the artefacts, he has included the “mechanics of the museum”, such as the strips of paper used to record environmental conditions around each item.
(Scroll to keep reading)
Alastair Gordon: ‘River God’, ‘A Lady’s Jabot’
Alastair first discovered Wimbledon Museum around a year ago when he took part in the group exhibition Brush with the Past. “I think the museum is a bit of a hidden secret. I kind of fell in love with the collection,” he says. He soon proposed an artist residency, one that would allow him to delve more deeply into local history and interpret it through painting. The museum agreed, and for the last three months he has been selecting objects to reimagine on canvas.
Choosing what to paint was a collaborative process shaped by conversations with the museum team. Some pieces are well-known, such as Red Teddy, a favourite in the collection. The museum’s Anita Lewisohn explains that the bear belonged to a family on Melrose Avenue who were saved from a flying bomb because they slept in their air raid shelter that night: they rarely used the damp shelter but that particular day their dog refused to come out. The only possessions to survive in the house were a hat, a chamber pot and the teddy.
A very different subject is the stuffed peacock that once roamed freely around the menagerie of Sir Henry Peek at Wimbledon House in the 1800s. Another striking inclusion is the keystone of a river god, once set into a bridge over the River Wandle. Alastair has painted the keystone in his signature style, flat yet almost sculptural, drawing on the 17th-century quodlibet tradition of trompe-l’oeil. Some items were found deeper within the museum’s archives, including a fragile set of pressed flowers sent home from the front lines during the First World War. The soldier who sent them never returned. The flowers became a cherished family keepsake too delicate for permanent display. Through painting, Alastair offers visitors a way to encounter them without exposing the originals to damaging light, preserving both the artefacts and the stories they carry.
Objects of Enchantment will be displayed primarily in the museum’s gallery, with several works placed alongside their corresponding artefacts in the main collection. Workshops for visitors are planned, and many of the paintings will be available for purchase, with a portion of proceeds supporting the museum.
Alastair, who lives locally in Tooting, is known for his hyper-real paintings of objects and for his plein-air landscapes of Wimbledon Common, some of which he later re-paints in the studio, turning his own works into subjects. “I paint my own work to look like museum artefacts. It’s all very meta,” he jokes. For Alastair, who moved to London from Scotland 20 years ago, this project has been as much about community as technique, deepening his connection to the place he now considers home.
