In his fourth solo exhibition at the gallery, Dominic Shepherd continues to marry a deep and ongoing interest in mythology with a personalised, idiosyncratic worldview. Made as part of the series Old England, the paintings in this exhibition reach beyond the personal and historical to the political. Britain, surrounded by water, is a haunted isle. Colonialism; slavery; conquest; feudalism; reformation; democracy; civil war. Every locus is invested with ghosts of the past, a misty and sentimentalised landscape. In a climate where nationalism has gained so much traction globally, Shepherd addresses the relationship between actual and nostalgic notions of received traditions, opening onto a consideration of the complex relationship between Romanticism, folk, patriotism and nationalism. Viewed in the shadow of fundamental political change, Shepherd has been
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