3/4 Humours
Broadway Gallery, Nottingham
19.07.25 — 27.07.25
Three contemporary artists revisit the archaic medical theory of the four humours: Sanguine, Phlegmatic, Melancholic, and Choleric. Rooted in classical understandings of health, the humours were thought to govern not only the body, but temperament and mood. To be well was to be balanced; to suffer was to be out of sync.
Benjamin Rostance (Melancholic/Black Bile) and Mark Walker (Sanguine/Blood), both New Contemporaries alumni, join Dr. Kerry Langsdale (Phlegmatic/Phlegm), each embodying one of the humours through their artistic practice.
The fourth humour, Choleric/Yellow Bile, traditionally associated with dominance, volatility, and aggression, is intentionally absent from this exhibition. Its absence reflects a broader view of the contemporary world, which is increasingly defined by division, anger, and reactivity. The Choleric traits already permeate public discourse, social media outrage, and systems built on competition, consumption, and control.
By leaving Yellow Bile out, the exhibition reclaims room for vulnerability and thoughtful processing, qualities often overshadowed by unchecked heat and intensity. It’s not an escape but a rebalancing: a quiet act of resistance that reminds us that true strength doesn’t always need to be loud.
Though humoral medicine has long been eclipsed by modern science, its framework of imbalance and restoration continues to echo in how we speak about mental health today. We still seek causes, diagnoses, and cures, ways to balance the “too much” or the “not enough” within us.
Each artist in 3/4 Humours brings a trauma-informed lens to their practice. Making art becomes a kind of inquiry, a reaching toward healing, a way of tending to the self and its unknowns. Like the doctors of old, we work without certainties. We search for answers we don’t fully understand, guided by feeling, intuition, and the need to soothe something unsettled.
Mark Walker
ID (180 8 10 12 14), 2025
Graphite on paper
50 x 66 cm
Mark Walker
ID (2/3 180 10 12), 2025
Graphite on paper
50 x 66 cm
Mark Walker
ID (180 10 12), 2025
Graphite on paper
50 x 66 cm
Mark Walker
ID (1836–26), 2025
Graphite on paper
50 x 66 cm
Mark Walker
ID (1836–26), 2025
Graphite on paper
50 x 66 cm
Mark Walker
ID (204 10 12 & 176 10 12) , 2025
Graphite on paper
50 x 66 cm & 50 x 66 cm
Mark Walker
ID (204 10 12 & 176 10 12), 2025
Graphite on paper
50 x 66 cm & 50 x 66 cm
A Geometry of drift
I want to start this text with the statement that I’m making these works at the most directionless, lost time I’ve ever felt in my life. With these drawings also feel lost. I don’t know why I am following this path down into these mathematical patterns, escaping into a system I am making more and more disordered. Being open with this might also help with my next steps.
It is through dialogue with Kerry and Benjamin that my position and aspects of the work have been brought into focus. Benjamin has shared stories of his upbringing and background that he is working through here in this exhibition. He has been encouraging me to tackle my background, too. My understanding of my working-class background, Benjamin has been very honest in explaining his, and how different his is to mine, which doesn’t meet the commonly assumed stereotypes. And Kerry, who shares her position, much more like mine, of not feeling a belonging in this class or that, a suspension between, where falling is most likely.
Kerry has generously shared her knowledge of the metaphysics of time, as that is what she is a doctor of. These discussions with her helped/pushed me to find a path and keep evaluating the relationship between clock and background.
My artworks are generally process-driven, and I am drawn to using machines, tools and techniques related to tradition, production and industry. Often with repetition, and with these tools, my hands and the amount of time it takes to make, I become encased in an industrialised clock time. The time I was indoctrinated into, that you work these hours, sleep these, and you better rest in the other few.
With these drawings, I am using techniques from drawing manuals to understand how to render spirals/helixes in 2D, and because of this geometry, understanding clock faces better, in relation to the failed introduction of decimal time during the French Revolution.
They have perhaps helped keep me lost, as I have worked through them to move away from an ordered rhythm, altering the numbers to avoid pattern, sticking with the drawings, to find what emerges. Instead of dividing circles by 360 degrees, I try 358, 382, 366. Instead of 12 points for a wavelength, use 10, 16, 26. The geometry shifts, the system broken just enough to stop the patterns repeating.
Multiple helixes with different wavelengths crash into each other, sometimes appearing to weave, something that would be impossible in three dimensions but work on paper.
The choice of numbers becomes the investigation, the choice of how we have made reality with the numbers we have chosen to use…
The numbers go in, the drafting is laboured over, the result is some flowing helixes. Some tubes that swirl and weave, behind every flowing line lies careful calculation, plotting circles on grids to find their tangling. Driving this forward is with optimism that lines create understanding, meaning.
My Sanguine energy – action always checked by laboured reflection, spontaneous gestures that must be questioned before they’re worth following.
The latest drawings achieve their own confusion, no clear patterns visible, which seems exactly right. They reflect the state of being between positions, always doubting, always spiralling toward centres they never reach, embodying the friction between felt time and measured time, between industrialised rhythms and artistic process. The patterns lead nowhere except into their own spiral logic, which may be exactly where I need to go.