During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Methodism grew rapidly across Britain, driven in part by itinerant preaching as well as its appeal among newly industrial working-class communities. The religion was characterised by a social kind of holiness, one that involved open-air preaching, small group meetings based around spiritual growth and mutual accountability called ‘class meetings’, and something known as a ‘love feast’. The latter of these, also known as an ‘agape meal’, was an informal religious gathering that featured the sharing of a small piece of cake or bread, and water passed around in a ‘loving cup’. The cup’s key feature is its handles – two arches placed opposite each other. This is where Charlotte Dawson’s solo exhibition If Memory Serves Me Well at Humber Street Gallery begins.
At the front of the gallery, perched on a wooden box, is a white tray of eight small cups. Nearest to the entrance is a teacup with one handle, the kind of thing you would find beside the tea urn at a hotel buffet. Let’s call it the original prototype. Around it are seven counterparts: seven developments of that prototype, each an increasingly inexact rendition of the first. Dawson accumulates handles in these vessels – some emulate the traditional shape of a loving cup, but elsewhere, the handles multiply unevenly. On one cup, two handles sit barely half a centimetre apart rather than oppocusite one another, forming a double hoop. The handles’ thickness varies from that of an elastic band to a thick hooped earring. Four, six, eight, the multiplying handles bow outwards. Seen from above, they start to resemble unruly spider plants. Their shadows are unexpectedly beautiful. Over a turquoise, eight-handled cup hangs a conker, suspended from the ceiling. Together, the two objects create an otherworldly shadow: the cup a planet punctured by rings, the conker an orbital moon teetering dangerously off-axis.
I like Dawson’s play at chaos, the manifold forms, the implied idea of trying to figure out how you might thread your fingers through the handles. You can imagine a child instinctively looping their fingers through these cups at a pretend tea party, while an adult hesitates, trying to make out how the object is meant to be held. This is how Dawson treats sculpture, taking an object and choreographing it to its maximum. She takes the Methodist vessel, holding onto the promise of communion, but scrambles the instructions, instead reimagining the loops, twirls, the very limits of its movement, concluding on something that is multiple.
As the exhibition title suggests, Dawson is interested in traces of presence, what we leave behind – the scrap, the bric-a-brac, the objects; as well as, once someone has left, what we remember of them. Thinking about it in this way, Dawson’s work starts to feel like the landscape of a dream recreated through unsteady interventions that mash up symbols and proportions. Things are recognisable but slip from their usual coordinates. This is most apparent in the loose network of conkers occupying almost half the gallery. Cast in jesmonite, they hang from the ceilinug suspended on cord. From a distance, they appear industrial, taut and heavy like iron chains, but up close they resemble something more like shoelaces, their aglets threaded through each conker, enough to give the appearance of a small tail.
It’s an appealingly witty take on the game of conkers. In fact, during my visit, a child walks through the installation – straight through them. Dawson’s conkers have undergone the same preparation as in the children’s game, collected and skewered on string, then hung from above. The difference here is the regularity, and an overdoing of it. The conkers are evenly spaced, except for what looks like an interlacing in the middle of the room, strings tangling together. It’s unclear if this is the product of someone who has walked through them previously, causing them to catch on each other, but the space would benefit from more of this interference, more evidence of the disorder produced by bodies moving through it. I want to see conkers cracked open, dislodged from their shells, their starchy interiors caught in the clean, waxy concrete floor. Enough for the violence of the game to slip through.
On the right-hand side wall are two tall fluorescent green forms that preserve the shape of a streetlamp. The fibreglass is very thin, as though a lamp has been coated in glue and its skin peeled away, taking the shape with it. Inside, leaves and stemmed roses muscle up against the surface, their shadowy and contained forms contrasting with the dayglo green. Fine scratches and striations run across the material like ice spreading on a car windscreen. Here, Dawson draws on the tradition of the immortelle, floral memorials preserved beneath glass domes at graves, though these versions are less pristine. Rusted flowers merge with fragments of bottles, a composite of objects collected at sites of loss. On the second lamp, the tension is more pronounced; a fluorescent tube appears broken at its centre, a slit of light cutting through the break.
Among a selection of books accompanying the exhibition, in a vitrine near the café, is Denis Foy’s Automotive Glassfibre: A Practical Guide to Moulding and Repair, an instructional manual on the use of fibreglass in car bodywork. Dawson describes the book as a ‘bible’ for her sculpture-making, applying a grim kind of circular logic. Where fibreglass may be used to patch the body of a car after an accident, Dawson uses it to reconstruct the visual language of the roadside memorial. Her flowers and lampposts occupy the space between repair and, in the artist’s words, ‘irreparable absence’. The publication’s ‘ectoplasmic green’ cover is even carried over, emulated in the colour of the sculptures.
The lurid, neon hue contrasts the adjacent wall, which is painted in a dusky pink and adorned with shallow reliefs of sash windows. Lauren Wilson, Curator at Humber Street, tells me these are modelled off windows Dawson recalls from a Methodist church in Wales, whose graveyard was also scattered with conkers. Rendered in pink, the wall feels distinctly femme, like being inside a doll-house-cum-hospital-waiting-room, especially when viewed alongside the cups at the front of the gallery. In fact, Dawson calls the colour a ‘hospital pink’, and while it induces a feeling of being in a clinical space, I’m not persuaded the architecture of the gallery is fully in dialogue with the objects. It is perhaps too flat, too isolated from the world created in front of it. I want the sheen of the conkers to get caught in the windows’ reflection, or even for the windows to give me a view into a real-life Methodist church (just think of the surreality – gallery giving way to chapel, conkers reflected against church glass; the confusion of which space we’re actually standing in!) Instead, the backdrop feels oddly disparate – it is only ever backdrop, failing to participate in what could be an even deeper, strange internal logic of the show.
Elsewhere in the gallery sits a stack of office paper, its edges die-cut into an elaborate series of tabs, interspersed with tiny bookmarks of Christ. Printed across it is a poem, beginning: ‘I lit a candle in a church today / I guess not a church / Cathedral would be the proper word / Almost immediately, someone nearby is talking loudly about A1 printing’. Dawson wrestles divinity with banality. She moves tangentially into thoughts about hand sanitisers beside candles and the possibility that ‘if you were a bit dense you might just light yourself ablaze to the left of the altar’. It’s a peek into Dawson’s voice – young and funny and able to hold reverence and glibness in the same breath. The same poem is printed on small cards at the entrance to the exhibition, rounded at the edges with neatly centred text, resembling the little hymn or prayer cards handed out in church.
Scan too quickly and you’ll miss the waggish final stanza: ‘I guess if you’re the son of God it can still be your birthday almost a month later / and some silly bitch can sing happy birthday to you whilst thinking about lighting herself on fire’. This is weird and strange but also stops the exhibition from being too sanctimonious about its own themes, which in itself is a gift. For all its gestures towards care and communion, Dawson doesn’t offer up neatly packaged meditations.
I come away from the exhibition caught between feeling as if I’ve just been in an IKEA store, whistled around a series of showrooms in which nothing quite fits or joins together – the toilet seats blocked off, the taps running dry, the cupboards holding the wrong set of cutlery – and one of the final scenes in Michel Gondry’s 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. As Clementine is being erased from Joel’s memory, he tries to hide her somewhere she has never been. He takes her back to his childhood kitchen, where she appears oversized beside his four-year-old self, crouched beneath the table. Rain, carried with them from another memory, begins to fall indoors. The hope is that by putting Clementine somewhere she has never been, she might somehow be kept.
There’s something of the film’s uncanny sense of scale here, as an audience walks around tiny ‘loving cups’, moving through room-height strings of conkers like some strange indoor rain. If Memory Serves Me Well sees how memory keeps things, truthfully or in sentimental holding, like a dream that betrays us. Like Gondry’s movie, objects of childhood and grief are muddled, until we are unsure where they belong. Perhaps in Dawson’s world too, we should be less concerned with remembering things correctly than with the strange shapes these things take when we try to keep them.
Chloe Elliott is a writer and poet based in York.
Charlotte Dawson: If Memory Serves Me Well is at Humber Street Gallery, Hull, 10 July – 20 September 2026.
This review is supported by Humber Street Gallery.
Published 10.09.2026 by Benjamin Barra in Reviews
1,756 words
