CURRENT EXHIBITION

TOM BUTLER
I Became A Room

August 16th - September 21st, 2025

It is an honor to present Tom Butler’s solo exhibition, I Became A Room. This immersive installation features nearly 100 original Room drawings created in isolation at the onset of COVID. What began as a means of passing time developed into an obsessive daily practice, resulting in hundreds of drawings over two years. The work became a visual mantra - a way of processing the intensity of the moment and creating safe space.

The exhibit also features a collaborative Room installation incorporating dozens of photographs, a selection of drawings, a Room sculpture, and an evolving drawing created by the artist throughout the show.

This is one of those exhibitions that simply must be experienced in person. Open by appointment. All are welcome.

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EXHIBITION IMAGES

ARTIST STATEMENT

Drawing Rooms

Drawing Rooms is an expansive collection of over four hundred pencil-and-ink drawings of imagined interiors created between 2020-2022.

These drawings explore the interiority that was part and parcel of the time they were made. In lockdown, these interiors - both from memory and imagination - brought my feelings of solitude and uncertainty to an eerie and uncanny “life.” I worked on the drawings compulsively, daily, with little understanding of what I was doing except for the catharsis they gave me and the knowledge that I had to keep making them. Almost without realising, I stopped after lockdown was lifted and filed the drawings away, the series ending as abruptly as it began.

Looking back, three years after the series finished, I understand these drawings — these rooms — as an odd kind of self-portrait; they provided space for my cluttered thoughts and somewhere to locate my anxieties for the future. For this reason, the rooms are purposefully incomplete and off-kilter: fissures bisect walls, voids puncture floors, a figure is seen hiding.

Their meaning became even clearer to me last year on a visit to London. I was there to help my Mum clear out her house — she was downsizing. I lost my father to dementia during lockdown, and she was moving to live closer to my brother. I now recognise how the loss of my father’s memory and the man himself, permeates these drawings.

For a few afternoons in London, my wife and I sat in my childhood bedroom as I went through thousands of old photos I’d taken in my youth — all my travels, all the parties I attended. Our mission was simple: keep it or rip it up and toss it. Thousands of photographs later, we realised I was hardly in any of them, and in fact, with many of the people who were, I couldn’t remember their names or why I took their picture. Most of them, we ripped up. “You were hiding behind the camera,” my wife informed me, “that was your way of being in the room.”

Although this is an exhibition of drawings, my relationship to photography feels suffused with this work. These interiors of my mind are both empowering and slightly melancholy, a way to reclaim space while also acknowledging that often, behind the lens of my camera, in a room full of people, I felt alone. My drawings, by comparison, gave me a greater agency; I could simultaneously become the room as well as the person looking at it. Since then, my relationship with photography has continued to change as well: I have abandoned digital photography entirely and installed a black and white darkroom in my basement, an uncanny space in its own right.

Now we have entered another stage of profound uncertainty, and I feel that creeping sense of anxiety returning, albeit with a different shape. Once again, the rooms of my mind feel precious and charged, if cracked and faded a little at the edges, but still resoundingly safe.

Tom Butler, 2025