4 boro’s
Minor Attractions
The Newman Hotel, 50 Newman St, London W1T 3EB
13-17 October 2026
Ned James invites; Dean Kenning, Nell Catchpole, and a collaboration of Tom Cardew, Bláithín Mac Donnell and Aled Simons.
One painting. Four audio tracks. Pick a voice and see what happens.
4 boro’s starts with a small painting made by Ned James and then deliberately makes things more complicated. Four artists, who have each made an unrelated audio track are invited to be coupled with a painting, audio works from Dean Kenning, Nell Catchpole, and the collective of Tom Cardew, Bláithín Mac Donnell and Aled Simons.
The painting doesn’t change. The soundtrack does.
Put on the headphones and the painting is no longer quite the same painting. Change the track and it shifts again. Four artists, four ways of talking around, through, against or possibly completely ignoring the thing hanging in front of you.
4 boro’s is part of a new series of abstract paintings in which Ned James constructs each work together with its own peculiar form of framing. The frames are made from things that already carry their own baggage: Björn’s headband, Greta Thunberg’s plaited ponytail, Fatberg-esque dog teething chews, and pig iron slag taken from a blast furnace site in Middlesbrough. The frame is not there simply to contain the painting. It brings another set of associations, references and cultural debris into the room. The abstract image gets saddled with something else before it has a chance to behave like an abstract painting.
image credit: Wall Street (1987) 20th Centry Fox
Abstraction has a long history of being tidied up and consumed by conservative collections. The radical made tasteful, collectible and safely unrepresentative, devoid of time, place and politics
The work plays with the slightly ridiculous expectation that a painting should sit quietly on a wall and behave itself. Instead, 4 boro’s gives it four competing accompaniments audio and framing, and lets the viewer decide which one to believe, if any.
The audio is deliberately separate from the object. There is no single authoritative explanation of the painting, no tidy key to unlock it, and no guarantee that the people speaking have agreed on what they are looking at. The headphones turn the encounter into something more private and slightly absurd: you stand in front of a tiny painting while someone else tells you what might, or might not, be going on.
The scale of the painting is part of the joke. It is small enough to require you to get close, while the audio potentially pulls your attention somewhere else entirely. The work becomes less about looking at a painting and more about negotiating between looking, listening and being told what you are looking at.
4 boro’s is therefore one work, four interruptions, and an invitation to make your own mess of it.
The title of the show comes from a short film by Geoff Marshall and Viki Pipe for Londonist.com in 2015 https://londonist.com/2015/09/video-four-boroughs where Geoff walks between 4 London Bouroughs in under 30 seconds.
Artist Credits / Biography
Nell Catchpole
Art work information to follow...
Dean Kenning
Audio from Meltdown Economics (2018)
https://www.deankenning.com/Meltdown.html
MELTDOWN ECONOMICS
Video produced in response to the 80s melt movie Street Trash as part of the artist project Sick Monday (organised by Dean Kenning, Liam Scully and Vanessa Scully) at CCA
Original exhihbition text available here :
Aled Simons, Bláithín Mac Donnell, Tom Cardew.
Audio from: Preserving Hole (2025) Division of Labour
Synopsis: Preserving Hole - A meteorite, a spoil tip, a mountain or an island. A fatberg. A co-authored story entangling fact, fiction and anecdotal prose. Three voices become one narrator, Celtic myth, folktales, traditions and superstitions are merged, layered and retold. A hole or a bog, subterranean preservation - like a time capsule in a biscuit tin with a dodgy lid, buried forty years ago but the water got in. What happens when fact becomes anecdote?
From the Division of Labour exhibition of audio, a breathing sculpture and textiles.
Preserving Hole is the culmination of a six-month conversational collaboration between Welsh artists Tom Cardew, Aled Simons and Irish artist Bláithín Mac Donnell. Emerging from research sharing and an exploration of practice intersections; individual interests are fused in tangential storytelling, narrative building and myth making. Unearthing spurious information and hearsay to present loose-narrative audio and sculptural installation, drawing on collective Celtic nation backgrounds. This project is a direct result of exchanges facilitated by the Four Nations International Fund.
Written by Aled Simons, Bláithín Mac Donnell and Tom Cardew. Read by Timothy John, sound design and edit by Aled Simons.