Humber Street Gallery is pleased to present Enjoy Civic Life, an exhibition of new work by Leo Fitzmaurice. Logos and signs are reworked and repurposed as an exploration into our relationship with branding, identity, architecture, and the history of objects.

The artist will focus on the way these image-word-symbols have lives alongside ours – altering and adapting, like us, to the changing world around us.

Through a mixture of installation, sculpture and video, Fitzmaurice has responded to a collection of mounted plaques on display in Hull’s Guildhall, which have been produced by local company GK Beaulah & Co Ltd since 1939.

Waypoint. Leo Fitzmaurice, Enjoy Civic Life. Courtesy of Humber Street Gallery and the artist, 2020. © Jules Lister

Leo Fitzmaurice also presents his sculpture, WayPoint, 2020 in the Gallery Café. Fitzmaurice has obtained the Pay Point Company’s distinctive terminals for topping up credit, which have been assembled into a freestanding sculptural work. Referencing modernist and constructivist art, the artist cuts up several of these yellow and black terminals to emphasise their shield-like qualities to create an ironic totem to the circulation of cash.

To download and read more about the works exhibited, click below:

Related Events

Artist In-Conversation: Leo Fitzmaurice with Paul Carey-Kent

Wednesday 4 August 2021
6-7pm
In-person, Humber Street Gallery
Free

Join curator and writer Paul Carey-Kent and artist Leo Fitzmaurice as they discuss the artist’s latest body of work for Humber Street Gallery, Enjoy Civic Life.

Empty Trash: A performance by Stewart Baxter

Thursday 19 August 2021
7-9pm
Humber Street Gallery
Free and open for all
Booking not required

The artist and musician, Stewart Baxter, will be presenting an exciting new live audio installation, performed using a collection of ‘found’ sounds from across the city. Comprised of semi-improvised elements and pre-recorded sections, the performance aims to present sound in a way that challenges our perception of our everyday surroundings.

Inspired by the exhibition, Enjoy Civic Life, on display at Humber Street Gallery until September, which focuses on often overlooked signs and symbols within our built environment, Baxter will create an installation involving tape loops and other audio devices to present sounds from a familiar place back to us in unfamiliar ways.

Related Activities

HSG x GK Beaulah: Design Challenge

To celebrate our new exhibition, Enjoy Civic Life by Leo Fitzmaurice, we launched a HSG x GK Beaulah: Design Challenge.

We asked children and young people (up to age 16) to design new coats of arms that represent them. From all of the designs submitted, three are being selected to be fabricated into plaques, which will be displayed in our Gallery Café.

The Artist

Leo Fitzmaurice, b.1963 Newport, Shropshire, England, now lives and works in Liverpool – based at The Bluecoat Studios. His work is described as a process of unmooring the meaning of things that are most familiar to us. To do this, he uses processes such as physically editing, repeating and mirroring, on images and objects such as packaging, brochures and signage and at a varying range of scales, from the very small and delicate through to the architectural.