Missing-Out
Daisy Smith & George McGoldrick
21 - 25 AUG 2025
Missing-Out is constituted by three separate missed experiences: a bonfire, a set of pub signs and a guard whose job it is to protect a coastline in mid-Wales from fires and parties.
In the early 2000’s around the age of 10, I would often find the burnt-out remains of parties held in the woods next to my parents' house. The emptied bottles, lost clothing, cans and ripped sleeping bags became the marking points for evenings that I was too young to attend. The more lost gloves and snapped tent poles I found, the more exciting the parties became in my imagination. Now, many years later I feel an acute nostalgia for these spontaneous rural parties. Parties that I never attended, that I hadn’t glimpsed at through the trees, but existed only in my imagination and in the evidence that they had left on the ground behind them.
For the Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder, born around 1530 near the town of Breda in the modern-day Netherlands, his memories of early childhood must also have been marked by an experience of separation. For him, what was missed didn’t take the form of an unwitnessed event, but instead the highly visible working-class culture that surrounded him. The evidence later in life of his obvious literacy and cultural achievements in Brussels and Antwerp suggests an upbringing within a social-class that would have set him far apart from the lives and revelries of the people that he would later come to depict. Of the 27 paintings that could have accommodated pub signs, 8 of Bruegel’s works include them and are often used as vehicles for commentary upon the wider image. His scenes of rural life, which initially appear to function as documentation of a particular time, place and way of life, are instead shown to have been formed in much the same way as the memory of a missed event. Separate landscapes are merged, vernacular costumes and architecture contradict one another and what is taken to be an observed pub sign is instead a reference to a friends engraving. Bruegel’s pub signs serve to make navigable an imagined world.
Between his responsibilities caring for his elderly father, Owen Bedrag - a security guard outsourced by the local municipality - patrols a Welsh seaside village. His fixation on what he views as transgressions committed by both locals and tourists soon consumes his time and labour. Despite his rigours training inChester, offenders repeatedly elude him. With performances by Martin Lysfoss Gunnerfeldt, Anthony Morrisand Elsi Williams.