England on Fire - Stephen Ellcock & Mat Osman

On Thursday 2nd June Stephen Ellcock and Mat Osman will come by the shop to present their new book "England on Fire: A Visual Journey through Albion's Psychic Landscape". 

Forget the tired rogues’ gallery of lords and ladies, forget the  tall ships and haywains. These images cut to the heart of England’s  psychic landscapes to portray an Albion unhinged, where magic and  rebellion and destruction are the horses to which the country is  hitched. On these fabled shores we are all castaways, whether our family  has lived here for four thousand years or for four.   Here you will  find depictions of ancient trackways, chalk carvings and standing  stones, of animal-masked community rituals, of streets set ablaze in  protest, of occult dreams and psychedelic prophecies. There are over 200  images by artists ranging from William Blake, J.M.W. Turner and Samuel  Palmer to Paul Nash, Louis Wain, Bill Brandt, Derek Jarman and Ithell  Colquhoun to present-day visionaries such as Paula Rego, Cathy de  Monchaux, George Shaw, Jamie Reid, Matt Collishaw, Tacita Dean, Lina  Iris Viktor, Yinka Shonibare, Nick Waplington, Dan Hillier, Nicola  Tyson, Sutapa Biswas and Chila Kumari Burman.   The mind-blowing  selection of images is accompanied by short texts by Mat Osman,  exploring magic and mazes, ghosts and gardens, shipwrecks and cities.  These poetic renderings of a spectral isle, together with Stephen  Ellcock’s hallucinatory visual journey, reclaim Albion as an eternally  inspiring and anarchic domain – an England on fire.