Round Up: Tendresse by Matthew Humphreys
- Jun 14
- 7 min read
Updated: 17 hours ago
Tendresse by Matthew Humphreys started with an artist trying to figure out what to do with 20+ years worth of film footage, decades of intimate family moments captured with a variety of digital and analogue cameras.
When an artist exhibits work at ArtBomb for the first time, we invite them to walk across the street and look at the building from a distance. We encourage artists not to read the shop as a conventional white-walled gallery space, but rather to see the entire building (its interior, exterior and the symbols of commerce and transaction implicit in its retail shop facade) as the artwork, as a creative intervention into public space. When members of the public step into the building, or even just walk past it, they are implicated in the art.
As such, for many visual artists who are perhaps used to presenting in more traditional art spaces, exhibiting a show at ArtBomb is a chance to entirely reimagine what shape their work might take.
For Matthew Humphreys, exhibiting Tendresse at ArtBomb presented the challenge of lifting his moving image works from the screen and realising them as an eclectic series of sculptural, painted and interactive works.
The result was a 12-week project which saw Matthew collaborate- both directly and from a distance- with school pupils, local poets & creative writers, each of whom were invited or inspired to make their own contributions to the exhibition. Local poet Ian Parks wrote a brilliant history of the pinhole camera to accompany Silent Light (2026), the walk-in pinhole camera fabricated by Doncaster residents, which in turn inspired yoga teacher Melissa Martin to host a creative workshop for 8 participants within the exhibition space (read more below).
For Matthew, presenting such an intimate body of work so far away from his home in London, and not being able to physically be with the work all the time, meant handing over a lot of interpretive agency to both ArtBomb's curatorial team and visiting public. Matthew's openness to local creatives translating the work in their own way and to these translations becoming part of the work was a huge leap in trust. It allowed the work to breath and grow on its own terms, whilst sustaining the tender intimacy of the family memories at the core of the work.
This idea of a London-based artist creating space for collaboration with strangers feels like an invaluable lesson for ArtBomb in terms of how we ensure that any work by non-local artists we present in Doncaster still offers a degree of creative ownership and opportunity to local residents.
Matthew's reflections: a voicenote (May 2026)
You know, the project initially started out as a moving image piece.
I’ve talked about how the footage was quite overwhelming and I felt I had to remove myself initially and start making things. It was through conversations with Mike [ArtBomb’s Curator] that all these ideas around object-making and bird motifs, bird boxes and carving and stencilling came about.
I remember mentioning that my mother went to the Deaf school [Doncaster Deaf Trust]. I didn’t want a collaboration with the Deaf school to feel arbitrary, you know? My work has Deaf themes but I think it’s important not to focus the whole work around that.
I needed some time to think about it, and what came out was the wonderful bird boxes and stencilling of my father's drawings. It was strange actually, having this intimate body of work sit away from me.
As an artist most of my work has been moving image- just single moving image pieces, which have typically either been presented in a cinema or in a gallery on a screen, and I can be removed from it.
But with Tendresse, there was a lot of sculptural and conceptual elements in this show that require the viewer to interpret. It was really wonderful that Ian, the local poet who visited the exhibition, contributed a descriptive history of the camera obscura to be displayed on the entrance to the walk-in camera. I'm really fascinated with the histories of things and I think the camera obscura for me was an important part of my creative practice- not only for being the birth of photography, but more so because of my father's condition- his blindness, his Deafness, his disorientation with Alzheimer’s.
When Melissa came in, looked at all the pieces in the exhibition, and was inspired to host a writing workshop within the space- that felt really good. I often think about my father's internal monologue, what he’s perceiving. It’s interesting for people to go through that experience of sensory deprivation.
It’s interesting as well having all these intimate works there [in Doncaster] away from me. In a way it mirrored how I felt sometimes. My father was in a care home for 11 years before he passed and every time I left him there was a sense of not knowing, but feeling safe. My mother’s in a care home as well, and I feel a lot safer knowing she’s there.
In a way, knowing that the work is existing, is being looked at or passed by in Doncaster, feels a bit similar… I’m struggling to find the words to describe what I mean. That’s why I create these pieces actually- I’m often trying to articulate my experiences.
There is a lot of work that didn't make it into the show- works that are still being processed. I think there was around 14 potential works that could have been in the final exhibition.
I think only two or three of these were moving image pieces or moving image sketches. I think going through this creative process made me realise the bigger picture- not of what I was trying to make, but what was appropriate for me to make in the form of my moving image piece [i.e. deciding which clips of family moments should be translated for audiences, and which should remain private]. That is my role as translator. Initially, I moved away from signing dialogue in the film. They [Matthew’s parents] were talking about everyday things that I have explored in Goodbye (Selected Videos 2010-13). But there were some heavier issues they were talking about- there was a lot of worry for my mother about illness and old age and the anxiety of not seeing family. I didn't want to make it [the exhibition] about that.
But through people viewing these works, it’s all about the space that appears between language and communication and I've been looking at the footage a lot differently now. I’m finding the gestures, the punctuation, these delicate moments throughout the work and now I'm collecting all these together and reforming.
It’s still based around the garden and the passage of time, but the work feels a lot lighter now. I feel a lot more confidence moving through the footage and finding my way to what will be the piece that brings the works that I made for Doncaster together as an accomplished accompaniment to the wider film work that I'm making. Its been a wonderful process, and the ArtBomb space has allowed me to explore.
I'm just walking towards Finsbury Park- gotta pick up some fruit and…yeah I'll sign off now. Thanks for everything guys, and I'll speak soon.
Doncaster Deaf Trust collaboration
Back in Febaury 2026, Matthew & ArtBomb spent a day with pupils at Doncaster Deaf Trust. Matthew hosted a morning birdbox making class for Year 8 pupils and co-created a custom wallpaper with KS1 & KS2 pupils, the design of which was inspired by his father's sketching of bird species native to Doncaster.
You can read more about what we got up to in our March 2026 blog post here.
In April 2026, 60 pupils and teaching assistants came down to ArtBomb to see their work featured in Matthew's exhibition. The wooden birdboxes have been installed in various locations across ArtBomb's shopfront and in the courtyard area, remaining in-situ over the coming months. This will serve as a lasting legacy of our collaboration with Doncaster Deaf Trust and long-term, a means for the ArtBomb team to monitor bird activity from our urban location.
As a continuation of the wallpaper design project, pupils were invited to participate in a large-scale drawing & finger-painting activity in the Doncaster Unitarian Church hall, bodies sprawled on the floor around long streams of paper. The group also had the opportunity to experience the immersive camera obscura installed in one half of ArtBomb's shopfront, offering an insight into the history of the pinhole camera & the chance to see a subverted image of the street outside.
Here's what the school had to say about the experience:
We had a fantastic visit to ArtBomb in Doncaster last Friday as part of our collaboration with artist Matthew Humphreys.
Pupils from across the school had the chance to see their own work exhibited alongside Matthew’s. This included Year 8 birdhouses and artwork created by pupils from KS1 to KS4 - such a proud moment for everyone involved!
During the visit, pupils explored the exhibition and took part in creative activities like stencil printing and drawing, responding to the artwork in a fun and hands-on way.
It was lovely to see pupils so engaged, inspired and proud of their work. A really special experience for all involved.
A big thank you to ArtBomb and Matthew Humphreys for this opportunity!
Head to Doncaster School for Deaf Children's Facebook page for more snaps from the school trip!
Dark Chamber by Melissa Martin: Creative writing inside the camera obscura
Building a walk-in camera obscura- something which Matthew had not initially planned to bring to the space, but an idea which came out of conversations with Mike Stubbs - is no small feat. The camera was designed to present an upside down image of the street outside. It did indeed do this, but under a set of specific conditions. To view the clearest image, the audience member was invited to step inside of the blacked-out room, take a seat on a chair or on the carpeted floor, and allow for at least 15 minutes to adjust their eyes to the darkness. Out of these more durational and functionally precarious conditions for a traditional walk-in camera obscura emerged an entirely different audience experience. People found that the blacked-out space, in combination with the conscious adjustment to darkness required to see the image, manifested an deeply meditative and sensory deprivation experience.
Melissa Elaine Martin, a Hull-based yoga teacher and therapist, interpreted the camera obscura as a human-sized birdbox, establishing a novel connection between the wooden birdboxes exhibited on the interior and exterior of the ArtBomb building and the camera obscura. Out of Melissa's visit to the Tendresse exhibition emerged a new point of speculative enquiry: what might it feel like to be a bird nesting in a birdbox? What would that smell. sound, look and feel like?
To explore this question, Melissa hosted a surrealist writing workshop on Saturday 18 April 2026.
The 2 hour session for 8 creative writers, titled Dark Chamber, began with a guided sensory and sitting meditation in the camera obscura, followed by free writing exercise and a reading share.
Melissa has since written a poem called Birdsong, which you can listen to via the video below!
