The Stolen Orange exhibition to honour Brian Pattern

The Stolen Orange Exhibition at Bond Street Gallery, Brighton, showing 80 artists including Andy Ash with Hands Catching Perception (2024) sculpture performance

The Stolen Orange show runs from 15th Nov to 14th Dec 2025, at the Bond St Gallery, Brighton.

The exhibition featuring over eighty sculptors, writers, painters, makers of all stripes, making work celebrating the words of Mersey poet Brain Patten:

The Stolen Orange

When I left I stole an orange

I kept it in my pocket

It felt like a warm planet

Everywhere I went smelt of oranges

Whenever I got into an awkward situation

I'd take out the orange and smell it

And immediately on even dead branches I saw

The lovely and fierce orange blossom

That smells so much of joy

When I went out I stole an orange

It was a safeguard against imagining

There was nothing bright or special in the world

My reflection on the work was to create 'Hands Catching Perception' from four simultaneous films/sculptures which I showed in 2022 in Japan. I was thinking there's a strong resonance between Brian Patten's The Stolen Orange and my Hands Catching Perceptions films. Both works explore small, sensory actions as metaphors for larger struggles of imagination, survival, and artistic meaning-making. The artist's hand grapples with everyday objects - pencils, pots, rulers — in repetitive cycles of grasping, dropping, bending, and breaking. These gestures speak to the fragile, often futile-seeming struggle to hold onto meaning, while revealing the persistence that art demands. Placed in dialogue, Patten's poem and my films illuminate the shared poetics of object and action. Both works elevate the ordinary - an orange, a pencil, a hand in motion - into symbols of resistance against emptiness. They suggest that even in failure, repetition, or theft, the imagination finds its safeguard: small acts that momentarily transform the barren into the blossoming.'

See review in The Argus

Image from The Argus