The Thousands

The blue-and-white palette of Private Island reads like Delftware and like Santorini, and that’s as good a place as any to find your way into it. A needlepoint-embroidered patchwork quilt, some watercolour and acrylic paintings provide the ground for Grogan’s tribe of Haringly loose-limbed and hairily classical-featured men to enact our culturally necessitated interconnectedness, seen through his understanding of islands as ‘places of sanctuary and peace, though at the same time they can be places of isolation and detention’. These are people on holidays and people in relationships, whether they want to be or not.

It is the ‘no man is an island‘ thing, even where the posited community is not one that is necessarily enthusiastic about so being. There is a lot of sex and blame and self-interest, all of which are largely treated as self-gratifying mechanisms, but because we need other people to be able to do those things the solipsistic is also, paradoxically, the social. Through the rawness of the desires expressed, there is also a sense of intimacy. Closeness is created by the personal and temporal investiture of the artist in the intricacy of Grogan’s techniques and his declared use of autobiographical material to constitute social commentary. Go meditate on this emergent occasion, John Donne.