Join us for the book launch of Goodbye Scarecrow, a collaboration between painter Billy Metcalfe and writer Siofra Dromgoole.

“Why scarecrows? It was hard to answer that question at the beginning, and it’s almost harder now to pin down. This book is made up of Billy’s paintings and my poetry in dialogue; but also the poems of others, their voices credited throughout. Each approaches the object from different angles — there are poems about lovers and poems about kindness, poems about nature and about hurt and about failure. One poet told me she was “interested in the frictional speech a shirt stuffed with hay would admit” another that they wanted to “go into the minutiae of materials that make the figure, the wood, the clothes” looking at “this idea of something meaning something until it doesn’t.” Many are looking at bodies; the hatred of, the joy of, all the pleasing inconcinnities. There is, happily, no one way of looking at anything.

Billy and I were living together when the bulk of the paintings were done, and they grew and spread around the living room. To my lockdown consciousness what I saw then was their jauntiness — I took hope in their colour, wondering how they kept up their enthusiasm for living and bravery for being, alone in a landscape. To us, much of the why was that — one to the wind, still standing, alright, still.”

– Siofra Dromgoole

About the artists

Siofra Dromgoole is primarily a playwright and screenwriter. Her work deals with coming of age in the loosest sense — what it is to come into new information and how we assimilate it. Siofra’s poetry has been published in numerous anthologies and she recently graduated from Goldsmiths with an MA in Creative Writing.

Billy Metcalfe graduated from Chelsea Chelsea College of Art in 2017 and has since been living and working in London. Working primarily in painting, curation and drawing. Billy has most recently been included in the charity auction "The Eternity Exhibition” (2020) at The Painting Rooms and the exhibitions "BIRTHDAY" (2020) at the White Crypt Gallery and “Pending” (2020) at the San Mei Gallery. Billy has also co curated several exhibitions including "Out of Bodies" (2018) at the THRDS studio and "Romeo, He’s Moaning" (2019) at the 5th Base Gallery.