“Is it possible that you do not have to be understood to be loved?” — so asks artist and poet Kit Griffiths in their new exhibition and installation, Delusions of Grandma. The resulting work is both personal and profound, an emotionally complex record of the artist’s reconciliation with their estranged family. Sculpture, paintings, installation, performance art and poetry combine to create a show that is witty without ever being glib, wise without being worthy. Above all, it is honest.

The small room is dominated by an installation piece, “Matriarch Throne Off”, in which two armchairs face one another from two dramatically different living rooms. One, a slouching leather chair surrounded by a clutter of Cliff Richard paraphernalia; the other prim, upright, tidy. Two worlds, and a single footstool in the middle, torn between the two.

The show is eloquent in every possible sense. Within it, words are artefacts: the scrawled notes for a difficult phone conversation; a poem half-written, dense with revisions; Whatsapp messages printed out and discussed. Another text piece is a record of an actual conversation, the breakthrough that sparked the artist’s reconnection with their father, condensed to three small fragments. Then there is the poetry: direct, insightful, funny and moving in equal measure.

Griffiths has the poet’s skill of finding the universal in the particular. One especially affecting work, a minimal outline of a man’s arms with a small red tin where the heart should be, is titled: “Dad stocks tinned tomatoes now that he knows I like them”. Their paintings have a poetic conciseness, conveying the essence of a figure in the details — hands, often, or arms. In “Daddy”, a father cradles an infant, his body only rendered where it is touching her. It is a portrait not of a person per se, but of tenderness itself.

By capturing their subjects through gesture, through what they do rather than who they are, Griffiths evokes the activeness of love — the choosing of it — that we don’t have to be whole, or wholly understood, to be cared for.

One expects work this personal to be painful, but Griffiths consciously leans into the warmth of reconciliation over the brutality of separation. The show is moving, wrenching even, but love and generosity are at its core. And, of course, an extremely satisfying pun.

Evie Prichard

Showing at Quench Gallery, Friday – Sunday, 12pm — 6pm, 13 April – 26 May 2024.