Underground Art
A wide-ranging collection of ephemera relating to the avant-garde and underground art movements of the later 20th century. This strange and evocative collection includes prospectuses, postcards and other advertising material from exhibitions at the Ingleby Gallery and Henry Moore Sculpture Trust Studio; and three issues of Trevor Winkfield's Julliard (7-9, 1970-2) and two of David Kilburn's occasional magazine Green Island. Winkfield was a British artist who drew his early inspiration from heraldry, yet worked with many members of the New York school.

The strange edges and connections between the works displayed here are shown in Bill Corbett's Spoken in Sleep (limited edition of 400). Dedicated to Kenward Elmslie, inscribed to Karl Torok and with a cover design by Trevor Winkfield this one piece is a nexus of the cross-Atlantic integration of the American and British scenes). Meanwhile early Pop Art escapee Joe Brainard is represented by Twelve Postcards (series 1), just one medium amongst the collages, theatrical sets, prints and comics he produced before his death in 1994.

The production of association ephemera is by no means the exclusive concern of the underground, however the descent of the later surrealists, the concrete poets, and the found linguists from Dada, and other self-reflexive and self-destructive expressions, gives the survival of such items a strange power. The postcard is a natural means of propagation for the non-mainstream, with its inherent symbolism as distribution mechanism, but it is also ultimately disposable, valuable for the message it carries, no matter how attractive the medium itself. The images become a window back into the fertile world from which they sprang.