We Travel In Our Minds: The Real Meets the Imaginary at Duddell’s

Description

Being neither a museum or a gallery in its own right, Michelin-star restaurant Duddell’s is a space that invites visitors to experience art in the city in a different way.

We Travel In Our Minds is an exhibition that plays with ideas of theatricality, the fantastical, travel and exchange. Ancient, fantastical figurines from special collections replace books temporarily as sites of imagination at the fine dining restaurant’s library. Among the objects are a stoneware figure of a merman from the Northern Song Dynasty (AD 960-1127), a straw glazed earthenware zodiac figure of a horse from the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907), and a pottery inkstone in the shape of a double headed turtle of the same era.

Completing the exhibit are Murrow’s equally curious wall drawings, which combine objects from the worlds of theatre, puppetry, music, trade, and navigation. In one of his drawings, an antique bronze drum is connected to an iron wheel to a part-mechanical, part-wooden instrument, to a puppet’s hand to a birdcage. In another drawing, a terrestrial orb spews a cloud of exhaust as a gigantic tree topples over, breaking a chained link to another orb.

By combining the real and the imaginary, this exhibit aims to remind us that what is possible begins in the interior world of the mind, and stretches out into the otherworldly.