London
“GHOST FOLK ECSTASY,” Tom Bull’s first solo show in London (on view through March 15, 2025), unfolds like a reveal in one of Hammer Films’ distinctly English horror movies, exposing the tranquil and unremarkable as unfamiliar, even frightening terrain. Unlike Hammer’s fictional thrills, however, Bull’s work seeks the authentic hidden inside the sham, even as the outcome remains unexpected—social realism investigated through the medium of sculpture, with material, form, metaphor, and structure modeled into the story of a divided society.
Bull, who grew up in England’s rural Midlands, has long been concerned with the disconnect between town and countryside, a gulf in understanding reinforced by the images of rustic calm marketed to metropolitan audiences by realtors and retailers. In 2021, he began to focus on forms derived from the domestic environment that epitomize the contradictions behind “cottagecore,” a pastoral trend promoted by high-profile celebrities and social-media influencers that strikes a chord with those yearning for a return to nature and traditional skills. (Taylor Swift’s 2020 album “Folklore” with its woodsy cover image helped blaze a path for ersatz bucolic values of self-sufficiency and simplicity to reach city dwellers through the medium of shopping.)
Bull chooses specific typologies that compress this idea of “home,” including seating and heating, which allow him to communicate this personally resonant clash in visual terms, and without judgment. His contribution to a two-person exhibition last year at Cob in north London consisted of a seven-foot-long waiting-room bench with a hand-crafted demeanor set alongside a Franklin stove-like burner with a tall chimney that curled into the wall. In “GHOST FOLK ECSTASY,” he has placed a stove in the heart of the gallery, its freestanding chimney topped by a simple cowl ready to emit smoke into open space. Around it are six straight-backed chairs—three near the heater, and three inverted and hoisted onto a peg rail running the length of one wall.
With this show, Bull’s ambitious use of sculpture as social commentary shifts up a gear by folding location into the impact of the work (Mucciaccia Gallery is situated near the high-end shopping meccas of Bond Street and Oxford Street). From the street, the installation has the look of designer staging: Bull’s objects stand out in stark silhouette against a bright, white space, like set dressing with catwalk potential. The act of entering feels like a tracking shot, with the visitor doubling as the camera moves ever closer to revelation.
Ambiguities soon show themselves. The chairs, free of ornamentation and made in a plain, humble style, appear to signal “natural,” artisanal craftsmanship, but they turn out to be assemblages that combine metal inserts, cable ties, and steel canisters with wood. Joints are visibly welded, and the seats are rushed with bike tire inner tubes. Every component is coated in deeply black, petroleum-based bitumen, an anarchic, smelly liquid that pools and ripples when applied. Bull adds boat varnish to maintain the fluid shine, which dulls with drying, and in the process releases a reaction between solvents as one eats into the other. At this point, the conceptual ground begins to shift. The similarly oleaginous steel stove is connected to a smoke machine powered by an acid battery that should not be left unattended. That the entire enterprise could go up in smoke is an outcome not lost on Bull in his riposte to the pipe dreams of the post-industrial urban bourgeoisie.
Does he relish these contradictions? The ensemble feels motivated by a desire to put the record straight, while the methodology is admirably supple, interweaving connections between object and metaphor. So, surface qualities that from a distance signal authenticity give way to the realization of artifice, the essence of art-making as illusion. Ironically, the bold, proto-minimalist outlines are achieved with an excess of ready-made stuff.
Bull employs Shaker furniture as an entry point to dive below the surface of modern life, a maneuver given currency by the cottagecore phenomenon and the consumerist brethren who look to it as an imagined salve for urban life. He has picked up on the ladder-back chair, peg rail, and box stove as facets of a shared language of sorts but then uses the Shaker reference as the hinge on which to pivot toward a reality that conflicts with cottagecore’s cozy nostalgia of sedate contentment. Look closely at the legs of his treacly black chairs—what remains of the labeling identifies them as pressurized canisters of nitrous oxide, the chemical compound known as “laughing gas” or “NOS.” In recent years, young people have rediscovered the sweet-tasting gas, commonly used as an anesthetic, repurposing it as a means to bypass reality and explore their minds. Bull gathers discarded cylinders that he finds in the streets around his east London studio; in the countryside, the highs induced by NOS offer a euphoric escape from boredom and the social disparities that leave young men kicking against authority.
The U.K. has banned recreational use of the drug to combat resulting anti-social behavior—particularly driving under the influence of NOS—a move that perhaps throws fuel on the fire since car culture, and its promises of freedom, reflects rural life far more realistically than any conjured cottagecore fantasy. If the message is implied in doesn’t get any more HARDCORE COTTAGECORE than this (2022–25), Bull drives the point home in a connected set of works that show how a vehicle will get you out of the rural cocoon, making use of found materials in the broadest sense—amateur videos sourced online, model automobiles, and, most forcefully, language.
Across the rear wall, “SHAKE” appears like a billboard exhortation. Spelled out in punchy eight-foot-tall black vinyl capitals, the word frames the diverse aspects of Bull’s canny installation, commanding the frenetic ecstasy and dancing of Shaker worship (for anyone missing the message, the title, Mosh Pit, makes contemporary connections clear). The accompanying exclamation mark appears to have slipped round the corner to punctuate Fuel to Burn (2025), a wall-mounted DVD player enclosed in a birdcage. The film is hard to make out—the screen is small, the picture degraded, and viewing hampered by the cage—but the encounter is harsh and physical. The action jumps and jolts as it follows a Swiss teenager’s aimless, adrenalin-fueled drive at speed through wooded landscapes. The looped cabling beneath the assemblage drops like the pendulum of a carjacker’s jump leads.
The fixation with automobiles as deliverance works deeper significance into Bull’s use of bitumen, layers of which coat the wedge-shaped shelf of RIP Minimalism (2025). Across it, four model cars—the Ford Escort beloved by boy racers, like the one in the film—are placed in angled, serial formation, as if channeling the spirit of Haim Steinbach. In these communities, cars confer identity, just like the upmarket commodities of cottagecore, and owners customize their vehicles to invest them with their dreams and fantasies. Bull reflects this behavior with humor, installing a franklin stove in each model for homey comfort. In ironic cottagecore style, a chimney penetrates each roof and seats swivel toward the grate. The diverse strands of Bull’s high-octane exposition seem to coalesce in this tableau. The shelf shines like auto body paint, yet the arrangement also emits a funereal tone, a latent note blending violence and the horror of conformity.
