Vicky Lindo & Bill Brookes I’m Feeling Hopeful
16 Dundas Street | Edinburgh | EH3 6HZ | 0131 558 1200 | scottish-gallery.co.uk
There is something cheerful about calling an exhibition I’m Feeling Hopeful. It is not a grand declaration that everything is going to be all right. I think it is more tentative than that, and much closer to the way Vicky Lindo and Bill Brookes make their work: alert to what is happening around them, gathering things up, finding humour where they can and making something from it.
respond to. As Brookes explains, the pot needs little landmarks that she can work around. After years of working together, much of this exchange no longer needs to be discussed. One makes something for the other to continue.
Lindo and Brookes have worked together in Bideford, North Devon, since 2013. Their practice is immediately recognisable, densely worked with drawing, pattern, words, animals and human figures. Alongside them, Lindo’s paintings reveal another part of the same process. Horses, cats, insects, flowers, medieval creatures, domestic objects and fragments of landscape appear and disappear. A sentence heard on the radio might be written down and become the starting point for a pot. An image found online, a childhood memory, a conversation with someone at beach boot camp or an object sitting at home can all find their way into the work. Lindo describes it as my brain on a pot.
Painting works in a similar way. Lindo often paints over screenprints or earlier paintings, leaving parts of what came before visible. Some paintings have two or three paintings underneath them. Rather than starting with a blank sheet of paper, she prefers to have something already there to push against. The result is a kind of visual patchwork, with one thought leading to another. Some of those thoughts go back a long way. Horses have been part of Lindo’s visual vocabulary since childhood. A recently rediscovered primary-school report praised her art but advised that she needs to move on from horses. She never really did. Growing up in rural Devon, horses and animals were simply part of life, and she still recognises much of her childhood self in the things she chooses to draw. Cats have proved equally persistent, as have willow pattern, birds, insects and the natural world.
This description is useful because these works are not illustrations of carefully worked-out stories. The thinking happens while they are being made. Lindo may begin with an idea or, more often, a combination of colours. Brookes makes the form but deliberately avoids perfection. A slight asymmetry or irregularity gives Lindo something to
The outside world is continually feeding the work. Lindo listens to BBC Radio 4 Extra and The Archers while she works, as well as audiobooks, and keeps a book of words and phrases that catch her attention. She also collects images online. Cats with Medieval Faces began with a line overheard in a radio drama and her enjoyment of the Instagram
account @WeirdMedievalGuys; Window Kitty incorporates a cat spotted through the Instagram account @WindowKitty, devoted to cats sitting in windows. A line from a Kate Atkinson audiobook found its way into the thinking behind Everywhere and Nowhere. None of this is researched with a particular work in mind. Something catches her attention, gets written down or remembered, meets something else and eventually reappears. As Lindo puts it, it can be just a tiny seed of things combining. There are more private currents running through the exhibition too. Objects once belonging to Lindo’s mother appear within paintings and ceramics, incorporated not as formal memorials but because they remain part of her everyday life and memory. Lindo’s mother was herself a collage artist and an enthusiastic collector of things. Her instinct for putting apparently unrelated material together has inevitably left its mark. For Lindo, including these objects is comforting rather than mournful: another way of continuing a conversation through making. This combination of personal experience and wider storytelling has been central to Lindo and Brookes’ work for some time. In 2019 they won the British Ceramics Biennial AWARD for Dead Dad Book, a series telling the story of Lindo’s Jamaican father, Michael Anthony Lindo, his disappearance from family life and the later discovery of what had happened to him. The complete series entered the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the V&A returned to the work in 2025, filming Lindo and Brookes remaking one of its key vessels. The original Wexford People is now on display at V&A East.
Their work has continued to enter important public collections. Following their Conscious Dreaming project, works were acquired by Aberystwyth University School of Art, including Drowning Man, Weeping Lion, Chris & Frances’ Cats, Great Big Loon and Conscious Dreaming. In 2025, Despair and Promise entered the collection of The Higgins Bedford, while the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge holds Sampler Bear and Ode to Obie. Museum recognition has not made the work more formal. If anything, I’m Feeling Hopeful feels particularly close to home. Bideford itself appears in the exhibition, as do gardens, remembered landscapes and things encountered in ordinary life. Lindo recently made work for The Burton at Bideford, the museum where she once worked and where encountering its collection of North Devon slipware helped set her on the path to making ceramics in the first place. There is no single story to follow through this exhibition. A mother plaits a daughter’s hair; cats acquire medieval faces; mushrooms grow through a landscape; butterflies offer advice. Memory sits alongside whatever happened yesterday. The serious and whimsical are given equal billing. Perhaps that is where the hopefulness comes in. These works acknowledge loss, uncertainty and the general strangeness of life, but they are also full of colour, curiosity and pleasure. Lindo and Brookes keep looking, listening and making. There is plenty to worry about, but for now, they are feeling hopeful. Christina Jansen
There is no single story to follow through this exhibition. A mother plaits a daughter’s hair; cats acquire medieval faces; mushrooms grow through a landscape; butterflies offer advice. Memory sits alongside whatever happened yesterday. The serious and whimsical are given equal billing.
1. Crazy Horse, 2025, gouache on paper, 50 x 65 cm 2. I’m Feeling Hopeful, 2026, earthenware ceramic with sgraffito, H38 x D26 cm
3. Everywhere and Nowhere, 2026, earthenware ceramic with sgraffito, H44 x D25 cm
4. Two Cats and a Tea Caddy, 2026, gouache on paper, 44 x 65 cm 5. Nowhere and Everywhere, 2026, earthenware ceramic with sgraffito, H34 cm
6. Building Bananas in America, 2026, earthenware ceramic with sgraffito, H20 x W31 cm 7. Window Kitty, 2025, gouache on paper, 58 x 44 cm
8. Cats with Medieval Faces, 2024, earthenware ceramic with sgraffito, H57 x D25 cm 9. Cats with Medieval Faces, 2024, gouache on paper, 79 x 58 cm
10. The Universe, 2026, earthenware ceramic with sgraffito, H38 x D26 cm 11. Leos, 2026, earthenware ceramic with sgraffito, H24 x W37 cm
12. Happiness is Here, 2024, earthenware ceramic with sgraffito, Ø38 cm 13. Animal Sampler, 2026, gouache on paper, 53 x 60 cm
14. Tala Loves You, 2026, earthenware ceramic with sgraffito, H24 x W42 cm 15. Don’t Worry About Me, 2026, earthenware ceramic with sgraffito, Ø38 cm
16. The Twins, 2022, gouache on plywood, 59 x 59 cm 17. Don’t be a Fascist, 2026, earthenware ceramic with sgraffito, Ø38 cm
18. Happiness isn’t There it’s Here, 2026, earthenware ceramic with sgraffito, H38 x D26 cm
19. Plaiting, 2026, gouache on paper, 55 x 36 cm 20. Everything is Connected, 2025, gouache on paper, 72 x 51 cm
21. This Wind is a Bastard, 2026, earthenware ceramic with sgraffito, Ø38 cm
22. Igonrance is The Parent of Fear, 2026, earthenware ceramic with sgraffito, Ø38 cm
Henry Moore Studios & Gardens, Hertfordshire, England
23. Flowa Pot, 2026, earthenware ceramic with sgraffito, H44 x D24 cm
24. Desire and Frustration, 2025, earthenware ceramic with sgraffito, H30 cm 25. Bug Bear, 2025, earthenware ceramic with sgraffito, H30 cm 26. Cauliflower, 2025, earthenware ceramic with sgraffito, H30 cm
27. A Helping Hand, 2026, earthenware ceramic with sgraffito, H40 x W54 cm
28. Trying to Force Peace Negotiations, earthenware ceramic with sgrafitto, H33 cm
Vicky Lindo and her partner, Bill Brookes, have been making ceramics together since 2013, working from their studio in Bideford, Devon, UK. Vicky studied Textiles at Herefordshire College of Art & Design (HCAD) and discovered a love of sgraffito pottery after she was inspired by a collection of North Devon slipware housed in the museum where she worked in Bideford. Bill also attended HCAD and trained and practised as a cabinet maker before working collaboratively with Vicky on their ceramics. In 2017 the couple won the Elle Decoration British Design Award, and in 2019 won the British Ceramics Biennial Award for Dead Dad Book; twelve large-form vessels which told the moving story of Vicky’s father, who came to Britain as part of the Windrush Generation, and explored the themes of migration, racism and identity. This body of work was acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Selected Exhibitions 2026 The Music is Black, V&A East; I’m Feeling Hopeful, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh 2025 Momento Mori, Andelli Art, Wells; British Studio Pottery and the V&A, Victoria and Albert Museum, London 2024 Blink into the Darkness, Alveston Gallery, London; Edward Bawden and Me, The Higgins, Bedford 2023 Conscious Dreaming, Aberystwyth School of Art Museum and Galleries, Aberystwyth; Folk at Heart, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh 2022 Scratching the Surface, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh; Alveston Assembled, Alveston Gallery, London
2021 Awarded, British Ceramics Biennial, The Goods Yard, Stoke-onTrent; COLLECT, Alveston Gallery, London 2020 Dead Dad Book, Burton Art Gallery and Museum, Bideford; COLLECT, Alveston Gallery, Somerset House, London 2019 British Ceramics Biennial, Spode Works, Stoke-on-Trent; Ceramics Showcase, Victoria and Albert Museum, London 2017 Enid, Peggy, Eric and Edward, Emma Mason; Ceramics Showcase, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Selected Public Collections Victoria and Albert Museum, London The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Aberystwyth University, School of Art Gallery & Museum The Higgins Bedford, Bedford
Published by The Scottish Gallery to coincide with the exhibition: Vicky Lindo & Bill Brookes I’m Feeling Hopeful 1 - 24 October 2026 Exhibition can be viewed online at: scottish-gallery.co.uk/lindobrookes ISBN: 978-1-917803-36-6 Designed and Produced by The Scottish Gallery Photography by Dave Watts and Bill Brookes All rights reserved. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced in any form by print, photocopy or by any other means, without the permission of the copyright holders and of the publishers.
16 Dundas Street | Edinburgh | EH3 6HZ | 0131 558 1200 | scottish-gallery.co.uk