There’s a curious cabinet in the corner of one of the collection galleries at Walker Art Gallery.
It’s filled with a mix of objects from storage, which have been used to inspire new work by Emma Rodgers and Johnny Vegas.
Obviously nearly everyone knows Johnny Vegas as a comedian, but he trained in ceramics at Middlesex while his comic career was founding. Emma Rodgers is, depending on how well you know her, best known for roughly crafted ceramic depictions of British wildlife, or for the giant Liver bird made from Meccano, currently welcoming you to Edge Lane Retail Park.
After COVID, and a pandemic that made nearly everyone in the world ask themselves if they were on the right path at some point, Johnny Vegas found himself back in the studio, creating new work. It was a chat to Emma Rodgers that had inspired it, and the two have been bolstering each other’s ideas ever since.
Earlier this year an exhibition of their work launched across two venues. The first, Bluecoat Display Centre has long-standing ties with Emma Rodgers. The second, Walker Art Gallery, offered its collections as response material to inspire this new collection of parallel work.
There are new ways of working for both artists in the cabinet that remains at the Walker (Bluecoat Display Centre’s exhibition ended in June).
But regardless of how things are made, there is a fascinating story of why in this single glass case. Not because of an encounter with an artist. Not because there was a goal. Because there was a drive for both of these artists to work with and respond to a collection that inspired them both as children. The work manages to be tensely anxious, but incredibly playful.
Both artists present something of themselves. For Emma Rodgers, anatomy and story-telling are prominent across her sculptures. For Johnny Vegas, it’s almost therapy.
Explorations of impostor syndrome and earning your wings, present the ongoing anxieties of performing, and of the fame that goes with it. There are four figures at the back of the cabinet, from the Walker’s collection. They were sold around 1860 as artefacts found by Thames mudlarks, Charles Easton and William Smith. They both turned out to be forgers, creating false relics.
Johnny Vegas’ ceramic crown is a fragile homage to those forgers, and the livelihood they chose.
I love seeing artists intervene in spaces like this, with collections this vast. But to see artists so well-known exploring practices at very different stages, and being so open about why, is really quite special.
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Metamorphosis: Johnny Vegas and Emma Rodgers is on display at Walker Art Gallery until 31st March 2025. Words, Kathryn Wainwright