Stephen Sutcliffe
‘Psychopomp’
27 February to 18 April 2026
Moon Grove is pleased to present ‘Psychopomp’, an exhibition of photographic works by Stephen Sutcliffe, including those taken from the archives of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester and the Lindsay Anderson Archive at Stirling University. Both series demonstrate the artist’s ongoing interest in refraction and doubling, alongside themes of serendipity, mortality, fragmentation, dichotomy, class, alienation, inclusion, contradiction, obfuscation and loneliness.
The first series, which has not previously been seen in public, has been developed from a number of double-exposed negatives of Anthony Burgess and his surroundings, taken in Bavaria and at the Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth in St John’s Wood between 1987 and 1993 by Burgess’ wife, the photographer Liana Macellari. These images are displayed alongside a second series of double-exposed prints from recently discovered slides of travel scenes taken by the British film director Lindsay Anderson. In both collections, it is unclear whether the twofold image was intentional; however, both have an unanticipated allure.
Of the Burgess and Anderson works, Sutcliffe has said the following:
‘Working in the archives at Stirling University, I found some double-exposed slides from Lindsay Anderson’s holidays. After looking through his diaries, I believe the locations to be Rex Harrison and Rachel Roberts’ speedboat, the singer and actor Serge Reggiani’s house in Mougins and the nearby beach (all in and around Cannes), along with Rachel and Rex’s house in Portofino and the town of Spoleto in Italy. Characters featured include Serge’s friends from European film and music and a mysterious Japanese performer who turns up in later photographs from Anderson’s holiday locations. It’s impossible to know if Anderson meant to overlay the images. I had been looking for the last photos he had ever taken, again in France on a break with two female companions. On this later trip, I think he was snapping away when he collapsed at the edge of a lake. The archivist believes that they are still in the camera, which was taken by his surviving family after his death. This alerts me to some prurience on my part, which worries me, especially since I have recently been offered similar double exposures, this time of Anthony Burgess during his final illness. On that occasion, the archive’s director Andrew Biswell loaned me a novel which incorporated images reflected in puddles in Rome. Apparently, the photographer had asked Burgess to write a story to illustrate them and, typical of Burgess, he achieved the reverse; like Bloom’s “giving birth to the father” from his The Anxiety of Influence (1972). Consequently, Burgess’ tale has become a kind of theme for this show. In his novel Beard’s Roman Women (1976) the screenwriter Beard is haunted by his dead wife. He then stumbles upon an old acquaintance who acts as a psychopomp, like Dante’s Virgil or Cocteau’s Heurtebise, leading him in and out of the realm of the dead. Since leaving Glasgow two years ago, I have taken a part-time job as a tour guide, escorting American tourists around Scotland and consequently visiting many of my previous haunts, which has influenced my thinking on these works, even though some have been previously exhibited and others have never been shown. In fact, all the photographs in this exhibition have a haunted, or indeed funereal, aspect to them (in someways I had planned this exhibition as a kind of swan song). They feel like they have one foot in the present and one in the hereafter.’
These works are combined with self-shot photographs by Sutcliffe involving reflection and distortion, providing views through textured safety and privacy glass that also have a prosaic and mysterious appeal. Taken across West Yorkshire, where Sutcliffe has recently relocated from Scotland, they are influenced by Thomas Mann’s novella Tonio Kröger (1903), in which an artist returns to his roots but feels unable to reconnect with the society of which he was once a member.
Of his Tonio Kröger works, Sutcliffe has commented:
‘These photographs through glass also act as doubles, this time literary and autobiographical. I have always had an affinity with reflections and refractions. At art school I painted camera-flash reflections in the privacy glass of the toilet door on the same floor as my studio. This work now hangs in my parent’s dining room, but I haven’t told them what it is. [In the exhibition, this painting hangs temporarily in Moon Grove’s kitchen.] Since coming back to Yorkshire from Scotland, I have felt very much like Thomas Mann’s character Tonio Kröger, experiencing difficulties relating to a community I left twenty-seven years ago, when the pubs and clubs were full of socialists, not Reform supporters. The key scene in Mann’s novella involves the titular character observing a dance through a window from a patio outside and feeling alienated from life, wishing he were a participant instead of an observer. In the book, Tonio mistakes the dancing strangers for companions from his youth; a wilful misinterpretation as in another of Bloom’s theories, this time misprision. This led me to take photographs through safety and privacy glass in various locations, the effects being both mundane and sombre. As Erich Heller, who knew Thomas Mann personally, observed, Tonio Kröger’s theme is that of the “artist as an exile from reality”, with Goethe’s Torquato Tasso (1790) and Grillparzer’s Sappho (1818) for company. In reality, I feel pushed and pulled from compassion to disdain and back. The playwright David Storey said that when he went to art school in London, they thought he was a “thug”, and when he went back to Leeds to play rugby, they called him a “ponce”. Feeling an outcast in both communities, and like Tonio Kröger, he could only write on the train between the two cities. I’ve always thought about the fact that privacy glass is used to stop people looking in, but what effect does this have on people looking out? All of the titles are based on the manufacturer Pilkington’s names for each glass pattern: Oak, Arctic, Everglade.’
In the dining room at Moon Grove, alongside his Tonio Kröger works, Sutcliffe has installed the scent of linden blossom, diffused through essential oil and absorbed into an aroma stone placed upon a G Plan table. The gesture is both domestic and elegiac, conjuring a remembered interior while opening onto another geography: Unter den Linden in Berlin. The fragrance operates as an invisible architecture, binding the space to Der Lindenbaum, the most celebrated song from Franz Schubert’s Winterreise (1827), set to Wilhelm Müller’s poetry. In the song, the linden tree stands as a tender apparition in the night, calling to the weary traveller with the promise of rest: ‘Here you would find peace.’ Yet he turns away into the cold wind, unable to return to the solace it offers. Sutcliffe’s infusion of scent summons this same tension between comfort and exile, warmth and estrangement.
Within German culture, the linden tree carries connotations of love, home, peace and protection; in Winterreise it becomes the emblem of a happiness that can no longer be inhabited. The sweetness of linden blossom, intoxicating and faintly funereal, suggests both sanctuary and graveyard; a fragrance of remembrance that hovers between sanctity and decay. It recalls private histories as much as cultural ones: the scent of a tree in a cemetery, the unease of new beginnings, the longing for reassurance. Like Schubert – who was himself confronting illness and mortality – Sutcliffe draws us toward sharp emotional contrasts: domestic familiarity against existential drift, the promise of rest against the compulsion to move on. The work lingers in the air, at once consoling and disquieting, asking whether peace is something we approach or something forever calling from behind us.
This exhibition also includes works made in 2012 that depict Vita Sackville-West refracted through a glass rabbit, similar to a gift, one of a pair, found in her possessions after she died in 1962. Virginia Woolf may have given the ornament to her one time lover apropos her short story ‘Lappin and Lapinova’ (1938), which is also the title of the three prints hung on Moon Grove’s staircase.
‘Psychopomp’ is a title that extends beyond its Ancient Greek origin – ψυχοπομπός, the ‘guide of souls’ – to describe the condition that runs throughout Sutcliffe’s practice: an ushering between states. Traditionally neither judge nor executioner, the psychopomp escorts the dead from one realm to another, ensuring passage rather than pronouncing verdict. Appearing across cultures as Hermes, Anubis, angels, animals or birds gathering at the threshold of the dying, the figure embodies transition itself. For Sutcliffe, this guiding presence becomes a metaphor for photography’s own liminal status. Each image carries the trace of what has been into the present tense of viewing; it is already a kind of afterlife. The double exposures drawn from the Burgess and Anderson archives seem especially attuned to this condition, their overlapping frames producing subjects who are at once vital and spectral; figures with one foot in the here and now and one in the elsewhere.
The psychopomp also speaks to a psychological oscillation at work in the exhibition: the movement from one image to another, from author to collaborator, from private record to public display. Sutcliffe has described his unease at encountering what may have been the final photographs of Lindsay Anderson, or images of Anthony Burgess during his last illness; an awareness of prurience tempered by a sense of custodianship. Graham Foster’s introduction to Beard’s Roman Women recounts how Burgess, asked merely to caption photographs of reflections in Rome, instead produced an entire novel: a work haunted by a former lover, by images glimpsed in windows and puddles, and by the impossibility of simple description. Sutcliffe’s title carries a similar charge. It suggests that his work doesn’t explain, but guides, leading us through reflection, doubling and the uneasy vitality of what refuses to disappear.
In a humorous gesture, on the living room’s mantelpiece, Sutcliffe has placed a Fido Pelham ventriloquist’s puppet; a small lion-dog whose fixed grin and parted jaw quietly stage another drama of doubling. The ventriloquist’s dummy has long occupied a charged psychological space: a split figure through which speech is displaced, responsibility deferred, and hidden impulses given form. In Dostoevsky’s fiction, characters frequently encounter their own doubles as embodiments of guilt, desire or moral fracture; In Nabokov’s Despair (1934) a parody of Dostoevsky’s The Double (1846) the protagonist is mistaken in his discovery of his doppelgänger through arrogance and stupidity; in Freud’s writing on the uncanny, the double becomes both a defence against annihilation and a harbinger of it; a projection that refuses to remain safely external. The puppet operates in this same ambiguous register. It is at once companion and scapegoat, a device that allows the artist to speak indirectly or attribute errors and excesses to an intermediary. As in the 1980s television programme Keep It in the Family, where the cartoonist Dudley Rush channels his frustrations through a puppet, the lion-dog becomes a mediating presence between maker and mark, self and work. Perched on the mantelpiece in a recovery position, it suggests that authorship is never singular but ventriloquised – thought thrown outward and returned altered – so that even the act of drawing is shadowed by another voice, another face quietly moving its mouth.
Doubling extends beyond the photographic image into the very structure of this exhibition. Anthony Burgess’s Suite for Four Hands (1975), performed by Ian Buckle and Richard Casey in a recording to be released in 2026, requires two players at a single instrument, their gestures overlapping, mirroring and crossing. Played in the living room and echoing throughout the house, like the images from Burgess’ archive, the form is itself a choreography of doubling: one melodic line shadowed by another; harmony produced through shared labour. This repeats the dual authorships threaded throughout the show: Burgess and Liana Macellari; image and caption; past maker and present interpreter. Authorship here is never singular; it is always already doubled.
Sutcliffe’s practice is fundamentally collagist, and collage itself proposes at least two ways of looking at once. Like the classic duck-rabbit illusion discussed by Wittgenstein – and resonant with Woolf’s ‘Lappin and Lapinova’ – one image slips into another depending on the viewer’s perception. Karl Miller’s study Doubles: Studies in Literary History (1985) begins with James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs andConfessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), a foundational tale of the divided self; a lineage of literary twinning that runs through Burgess and into Sutcliffe’s return to him as subject. The archival double exposures of Lindsay Anderson, the refracted glass works, and the haunted figures of Burgess all insist on simultaneity: presence and absence, accident and intention, vitality and elegy. Even the exhibition’s title, ‘Psychopomp’, names a figure who guides between worlds, escorting consciousness from one state to another – another form of twinned existence.
Running quietly through ‘Psychopomp’ is also a current of time travel. Photography is already a modest form of it: a mechanism by which the past arrives intact yet altered, insisting on its presence in the present. Sutcliffe’s engagement with archives – returning to Burgess and encountering Lindsay Anderson’s double exposures decades after they were taken – creates a temporal folding in which moments separated by years coexist within a single frame. The double exposure becomes a visual analogue for this condition: two times occupying the same surface, neither wholly dominant. Burgess’s music for four hands, played in the present, reanimates gestures composed in another era; the scent of linden blossom conjures nineteenth-century song within a contemporary domestic interior. In this sense, the psychopomp is also a guide through time, escorting images, sounds and selves across decades, allowing the exhibition to function as a kind of séance in which past and present briefly share the same room.
There is a restorative dimension to this repetition. The myth of Achilles’ spear – wounding with one touch and healing with another – suggests that what harms can also mend, that the second gesture answers the first. Sutcliffe’s returns, reuses and reframings operate in this spirit: an image once overlooked is touched again and altered; an archival fragment reanimated; a life revisited through another’s lens. Doubling here is not mere duplication but a dynamic exchange, an oscillation that produces meaning in the gap between versions. Like four hands at one piano, or two voices sharing a single line of text, the exhibition unfolds as a set of crossings, each work leaning toward its counterpart, each image aware of its echo.
The artist and Moon Grove would like to thank The Elephant Trust; the International Anthony Burgess Foundation and Andrew Biswell; the University of Stirling and Karl Magee; Rob Tufnell, Andy Sutcliffe, David Sutcliffe, Margaret Sutcliffe and Fiona Jardine; Alan Dimmick; Norman Hull; Ian Buckle and Richard Casey for music; Alec Aarons at Fresh Aire and Omni Colour for printing; AM Cole and Bryony Bond for framing, with gratitude to all who have supported the development and presentation of ‘Psychopomp’.
Stephen Sutcliffe is a UK based artist who was born in Harrogate in 1968. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘You Can Come in But You Won’t Like it’, Rob Tufnell, 2023; ‘High Windows, Dead Birds’, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, 2019; ‘Sex Symbols in Sandwich Signs’, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, 2017; and ‘Twixt Cup and Lip’, The Hepworth Wakefield, 2017. In 2024 he presented ‘Memories of the Five Administrations’, a joint exhibition with Simon Bedwell at Beaconsfield Gallery, London, while in 2018 he participated in the Manchester International Festival on a film for the Whitworth Gallery titled No End to Enderby in collaboration with Graham Eatough for which they won the Contemporary Arts Society Award. In 2019 he had two books published, the monograph at Fifty (Sternberg Press) and Much Obliged, (Book Works), a kind of autobiography. In 2012 he won the Margaret Tait Award.