‘Pages from The Hunters Enter the Woods Cartoon’ is an exhibition of drawing, painting, collage and performance by Sam Keogh. This work expands on Keogh’s recent series of large-scale paper collage works which draw heavily from ‘The Unicorn Tapestries’ - a series of seven 16th-century Flemish tapestries depicting the pursuit of a unicorn through an idealised landscape.

Flemish tapestries from this period required vast wealth to produce and were commissioned by aristocrats or wealthy merchants to demonstrate their social standing. During the French Revolution, many such artefacts were destroyed in acts of iconoclasm or repurposed toward more useful ends. Sections of The Unicorn tapestries were used to protect fruit trees from frost or to keep horses warm in winter months. The tapestries’ surfaces, pockmarked by areas of damage and repair, serve as a material index of these events; each one a fraying, tearing and patching up of Europe’s historical narrative.

In Keogh’s work, the tapestries are re-made as ‘cartoons’, or 1:1 scale working drawings used in tapestry production. Here, the establishing shot of The Unicorn Tapestries exists as a thumbnail, with two ‘Pages of hounds’ pulled out of context by a framing device similar to the ‘camera arrows’ of storyboarding, a hand-drawn tool of pre-production which anachronistically chimes with the tapestry cartoon.

Floating above the two pages is a spectral silhouette of a rabbit. Its palette of acidic dayglo green sits strangely against the earthier tones of the pages and their dogs, and its style of figuration is closer to a more contemporary cartoon, that of Disney or Warner Bros (or both, as was the case in Who Framed Roger Rabbit).

Keogh will perform twice during the exhibition, interacting with the cartoon to bring its characters into dialogue. A scene unfolds in which the rabbit draws the pages deeper into the woods. They follow with curious trepidation. But the rabbit evades capture through digression, association and circumscription – manoeuvres which allow it to break free of its frame and play in the gaps between the pages’ world and ours.