A recent visit to Tate Britain inspired this inaugural online exhibition. Smitten by the work of Hurvin Anderson, whose work often moves between memory and history, belonging and estrangement, his paintings resonate deeply with our own liminal sense of being.
In his painting, Scrumping, Anderson revisits a childhood memory of his brother stealing apples from a local orchard (a term we were unfamiliar with- but now love). The painting overlays an apple tree onto the fading image of a mango tree, merging both Anderson’s Caribbean and British landscapes into one. The figure gathering fruit becomes a symbol of someone suspended between places, cultures, and ideas of home.
This exhibition brings together artists whose practices emerge from similar experiences of movement, migration, and re-rooting. It considers what it means to belong to more than one place at once; to carry memories of one landscape while existing in another. The works reflect on departure and return, inherited histories, and the fragile architecture of ‘home’. They ask whether home is a fixed location or something continually assembled through memory and care.
Anderson has described the act of scrumping as formative: children climbing trees, making their own rules, working with what was available to them. There is something quietly radical in this. It suggests resourcefulness, self-determination, and the desire to claim space within systems that were not built for you. These ideas align with the ethos of Small Works as we support artists who continue to make work despite financial, personal, and systemic pressures. Our guiding principle—do what you can, work with what you’ve got—echoes the spirit of scrumping itself.
Scrumping Apples is dedicated to artists who have crossed borders, built homes in unfamiliar places, and continue to make work through uncertainty. It is also a reflection on artistic persistence: holding on to the early impulses that first compelled us to create while remaining open to transformation. Like Anderson’s figures moving between continents and histories, the artists in this exhibition occupy spaces of transition. Their works remind us that identity is not fixed but continually negotiated, shaped through movement, memory, and imagination.
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