It is surprising to come across such things because the night sky is no longer cold and silent. It rumbles with Heathrow’s next arrival and on bright white screens, information is shown through the night before empty roundabouts. Looking at Hamel Cooke’s work is to turn away from information and entertainment, and to reassociate oneself with silence, with the geologic time of mountains. To look and know it is clay (was earth) shaped by thumbs and fingers. To see a strange coherence of familiar forms charged with a life that we cannot know. A womb tomb. A life that reaches, hears, knows itself and is beyond us- as the night sky once was.

The work is concerned with the structure of growth and the process of organic regeneration. The sculpture is not fecund; it does not produce spawn. Rather, old processes of regeneration inhabit the lobes, spars and stems. With no obvious artistic antecedents and an abstract practise that is concerned with imperceptible processes in the natural world, it may be said that Hamel Cooke works in unchartered territory.

The Well Head is the inaugural show of BRINK. With the support of the gallery, Hamel Cooke has, for the first time, made work in bronze. These three pieces, each an edition of seven, cast long shadows and mark a turning point in Hamel Cooke’s practise. Curated by Hamel Cooke and Richard Parr, this show inhabits the space designed by the architectural practise Richard Parr Associates and extends through the practise, into the library.