To celebrate the first anniversary of the gallery, Palmer Gallery will be launching The Door, a new programme hosted in the annexed space at the back of the gallery. Functioning as a pseudo-project space, The Door is dedicated to supporting artists who work in less commercially-driven practices, offering them a platform to create immersive, experimental, and conceptual environments. This new initiative will feature a series of solo exhibitions running alongside the main gallery programme but with a sharper focus on experimentation, worldbuilding, and sensory engagement. The programme launches on March 6th with a solo presentation by Daria Blum.
Each presentation will showcase artists whose practices emphasize multi-sensory installations, site-specific work, and the transformation of space into immersive and thought-provoking environments. The
name The Door is drawn from a poem by the Czech modernist Miroslav Holub. The poem is about stimulating intellectual curiosity through endeavour, while feeling and responding to reality through an appreciation of the present. It encourages readers to embrace change and uncertainty by stepping into the unknown, suggesting that even the act of opening a door can lead to discovery, renewal, and possibility. The name also highlights the physical partition between the main gallery and The Door space, serving as a gateway into the artist’s world – a portal that can be shaped and reimagined with each new
presentation.
The Door’s first presentation will be by Daria Blum, a performance artist and Royal Academy Schools alumna. The work presented at Palmer Gallery is based on Blum’s reflections on the role of the live performer, and her own attempts at deflecting and withdrawing from the audience’s gaze and attention. Blum’s presentation at The Door stages an intriguing interplay of objects, text and lighting, which makes use of reflective surfaces to implicate the viewer and explore how an installation can embody or stand in for semi-fictional personas. The presentation forms part of a wider body of work that includes Blum’s thought processes around female friendship. Within her text-based work, Blum moves through aspirations, half-truths and fiction, often using a first-person perspective to narrate semi autobiographical relationships, encounters, and disputes between various female characters and alter egos. Parts of this written text were included in her recent installation ‘Drip Drip Point Warp Spin Buckle Rot’ at Claridge’s ArtSpace, in which chronic cranial pain was personified as both an intrusive female presence and a compulsive liar. Blum’s work at The Door delves further into themes of dishonesty, deflection, and fiction within performance, sculpture, and storytelling.
