"When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning"

 Jean Baudrillard, 1998

Bobinska Brownlee is delighted to present a solo mixed media installation by Richard Ducker, exploring the changing nature of our relationship to the present in a ‘post truth’ era. 

The short film Instamatic, presenting as a slide show of family photographs, directly considers the emotional pull of nostalgia through the illusion of memory.

Meanwhile, a shift in scale and provenance of the installation positions a double self portrait of the artist, aged around 6 years old, over a large vinyl print of a still from the film, confusing context through instability of meaning.

In Year Book, a series of drawings focuses on the moment of a paradigm shift to our ‘post truth’ world of ‘alternative facts’. Twenty six people, mostly children, were killed in the Sandy Hook mass shooting of 2012. The conspiracy theory which gained most traction in the aftermath of the tragedy posited that the incident was faked and peopled with ‘crisis actors’. In Year Book, each deceased child is drawn from a Google image search, the attempt to fix a fading memory in ink, a metaphor for an idea of what might constitute a fact.

Richard Ducker is a graduate of Goldsmiths University of London (MA Fine Art) and Reading University (BA Fine Art). He has exhibited extensively, including Jerwood Drawing Prize, Kettles Yard and Serpentine Gallery. Recent solo shows include Finch gallery (2026), Empathy & Risk (2025), The Cut Gallery Suffolk (2024), The Big Screen Focal Point Southend (2023), Cross Lane Projects Kendal (2022), Thames-Side Studios (2022).

Richard Ducker was the founder and director of Fieldgate Gallery (2006-2008), a large artist-run not for profit space in Whitechapel, London. He continued to curate exhibitions under the Fieldgate Gallery name until 2020.

Image:

Still from ‘Instamatic’ Richard Ducker
2024