Sam Keogh’s solo exhibition The Hunters Enter The Woods Cartoon is at ADA Projects, Rome from 20 September – 2 November 2024.

The Hunters Enter The Woods Cartoon is the first in an ongoing series of installations encompassing drawing, collage and performance. The series is based on The Unicorn Tapestries, a group of seven early modern Flemish tapestries currently in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum in New York. 

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. 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 made for the production of a tapestry. 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.