Art in the Bar: Dale Holmes: Toilscape for Lithic Child

A new installation in Chapter’s café by artist Dale Holmes brings together a series of large-scale paintings that explore landscape and community through the persistence of stones, earthworms and black metal culture.

About the artist

Dale Holmes’ painting practice is internationally recognised for its focus on materiality, narrative strategies and logics of display that critique and embody modes of audience attention. His working process incorporates performance and writing and spills out of the studio into feral collaborations and ‘cuckoo’ residencies with unsuspecting partners, like local members clubs and famous sports brands. The performance of cultural heritage, medieval imaginaries and narrative traditions, speculative philosophy, black metal culture, and clubs and guilds are facets of Dale’s overarching inquiry into making, class, and communality.  

Recent exhibition and performances include: Egg, Todmorden and Steam Works, Wandsworth (both 2024), Gloam, Sheffield (2023), Huddersfield Art Gallery, Temporary Contemporary, Huddersfield and Kunstverein Nürnberg (all 2022), Editions Gallery, Bochum (2021) Galerie Sabine Knust, Munich, Xi'an Academy of Fine Art, Xi'an, Queens Hall Centre, Hexham, and Xero, Kline and Coma, London (all 2019). Non-conventional exhibition sites and surfaces have included a bicycle, sportswear, chain link fences around a tennis court and stage backdrops for medieval drone band Slugmilk.