Last weekend we caught up with artist Tommy Brentnall at the No Ordinary Town exhibition currently showing in the Clayden Gallery at Quay Arts Centre in Newport.
The exhibition is the culmination of a year-long programme of work spearheaded by Boojum&Snark‘s Creative Director, Tracy Mikich, called Sandown Rocks.
Listen to Simon’s conversation with Tommy and read the background below.
Survival
As well as being involved with the creation of The Sandown Tarot (listen to our chat with him and Anmarie Bowler), Tommy also spent a month as artist in residency at Boojum and Snark in Sandown over the summer.
The theme of artist Tommy’s residency was Survival. Inspired by Charles Darwin, who began On the Origin of Species whilst staying in Sandown, Tommy explored how the town could adapt and evolve to meet the challenges of survival.
His work departs from Darwin’s idea, “One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die,” offering a more benevolent take on this idea, imagining a future where survival is not about competition, but about harmony and community.
“I really wanted to make sure I did it justice as a place”
Tommy talks us through the selection of drawings he created whilst on his residency. The drawings are all created in pastel, a medium which Tommy says was a gift to himself. He explained,
“The way that I entered into the residency was getting to know the place. I have spent a lot of time in Sandown but I really wanted to make sure I did it justice as a place.
“And so I spent a lot of time just wandering around Sandown, drawing the buildings, chatting to people. It’s always very nice when you sit out drawing, people come up to you and start asking you about stuff.”
Hooked on the monolithic container ships
As soon as Tommy told passers-by that he was working on a project about the future of Sandown, they would be very keen to tell him what they thought about the future of the town.
“That was a good way of gathering ideas. But while I was doing all this drawing, I got really, really stuck on these monolithic container ships that sit out in the bay.
“You can see them at all times, and they sit there, waiting to go into port. And they’ll sit there for days at a time. So it’s this ever shifting landscape, where you’ll have a couple for a few days, and then they’ll change, and you have different ones.”
He added,
“It was a really enjoyable way of starting to create this abstract visual language that I was then going to take forward into thinking about the future possibilities of the town.”
As context, Tommy works as an illustrator and is used to working to pretty short deadlines, so having the luxury of time to work on a single project was a rare treat.
Rewilding Sandown
As Simon walked through the exhibition, Tommy went into more detail about each of the drawings, what they represented and how they came about.
“On the side wall, if you come to the show, there are large drawings of these strange, futuristic characters, and these large amorphous, junkyard boat things. So obviously, I was doing all these drawings of boats, but I was also doing outreach and chatting to people, and building up this timeline of possible futures.
“One of these futures related to the rewilding that is going on in Sandown at the moment, the more long-term projects looking bringing the wetland environment back into the outskirts of the town, and just generally on the Isle of Wight as well. So if we’re doing these restorative projects, what does that look like in the future? And as you know, as you start to get further into the future, you start to become more imaginative.
“There were a few conversations about a non-human democracy, which is the idea of inviting animal and plant life, non-human life, into democratic decisions. Recognising that we share a space with other organisms, and inviting them to have a say in how that space is run.”
This led to a fascinating chain of thoughts and insight into how and where Sandownians could fit into Sandown’s future.
You can hear in more detail in the recording below, as well as more detail about others elements of Tommy’s residency and the community involvement.
Listen to our conversation
You can listen to Simon chatting with Tommy by clicking on the play button below. You can pause, jump back 10 seconds, or jump forward 30 seconds. You can also leave it playing on the page whilst using other apps on your phone, or use other browser windows on your tablet or computer.
Visit the exhibition
No Ordinary Town continues until 29th November 2025, open daily from 10am-4pm in the Clayden Gallery.
Sandown Rocks is a year-long project supported by Arts Council England.
Find out more about Boojum and Snark by visiting their website.
