Rhubarb and Custard

Working as In Place with artists Sara Cooper, Ronan Devlin and Alan Hathaway we were awarded funding by the North of Tyne Culture and Creative Investment Programme, delivered by Creative UK and funded by the North of Tyne Combined Authority, to explore different facets of the town in a series of images intended to challenge, question, or enhance our relationship with place.

I started researching a boarded up building, in the Triangle, but couldn’t find much in the local library, so I shared a photo online. The response was overwhelming—people remembered it as a grogg shop, a tattoo parlour, a sweet shop, a second-hand store. This sparked a deeper interest in the site and its layers of memory. I became fascinated by how one small space could hold so many lives and stories. The resulting riso printwork temporarily pasted on the boards, explores these ideas—repetition, movement, nostalgia—and reflects my own childhood memories of local shops, rhubarb and custard sweets, and everyday community rituals.