Lean in: the tiny worlds of Branwen Rowe, by Imogen Clare

An original contemporary exhibition review.

You are handed a magnifying glass at the door. That is the first surprise of ‘The Whole World, Smaller’, the exhibition of Branwen Rowe’s paintings now showing at the Old Chapel gallery in Kelmsby. The second is that you will need it.

Rowe, who died in 2019 at the age of eighty-seven, spent almost fifty years painting on objects no bigger than a playing card: the lids of tobacco tins, the backs of buttons, slivers of driftwood from the beach below her cottage. She never sold a picture and showed her work to almost nobody. When her niece cleared the cottage, she found more than 600 of them in a biscuit tin and two shoeboxes under the bed.

Ninety have been chosen for this show, and the curators have made a bold decision. The chapel is vast, whitewashed and almost empty. The paintings sit alone in small glass cases along the walls, each lit by a single pinprick of light, so that you must cross acres of bare floorboards to reach a picture the size of a thumbnail. It should feel absurd. Instead, it feels like a pilgrimage.

Lean in, and whole worlds open. On a button barely two centimetres across, Rowe has painted a harbour at dusk: the boats, the lamplit windows, a single figure on the jetty, even the reflection of a gull in the oily water. On a tobacco tin lid, a woman hangs out washing in a high wind, and every sheet billows in a different direction. I counted the slates on a cottage roof the width of a fingernail. There were forty-one.

What is astonishing is not only the skill but the patience, and the love. These are not showpieces. Most of them record the ordinary life of a small fishing village over half a century: the postman, the lifeboat launch, children on a sea wall, a dog asleep in a doorway. Rowe seems to have looked at her neighbours more closely than they ever looked at themselves.

The effect on visitors is remarkable. The hush was total. Strangers stood shoulder to shoulder, bent over the same tiny case, passing the magnifying glass between them without a word. One elderly man stayed in front of the harbour painting for so long that a steward brought him a chair. ‘That’s my father’s boat,’ he said quietly, to nobody in particular.

There are limits. Ninety tiny pictures are tiring to look at, and the final room, which displays the biscuit tin itself, tips a little into sentiment. But these are small complaints about a show that asks you to slow down and rewards you, a hundredfold, when you do.

I walked out into the bright afternoon and found that everything looked different: the grain of the chapel door, the lichen on a wall, the light on the water. That, perhaps, is Branwen Rowe’s real gift. She does not make the world smaller. She makes you look.

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