29 September 2021

HAND. Exhibition by Agenda Brown

Posted by the Cake Shop


In a special collaboration, the London Review Bookshop & Cake Shop are currently hosting Agenda Brown’s HAND.  exhibition, which continues until 9 January. Creating an installation across four sites in our beautiful Bloomsbury courtyard, HAND. prints appear in the windows of Rodic Davidson Architects and The Classic Camera, alongside an interior installation at the London Review Bookshop and Cake Shop.

Join us on Thursday 7 October from 6 p.m. when the Cake Shop will be serving fine teas from Postcard Teas, and the Bookshop will be open for Late Shopping with 10% off all books. To be in with a chance to have your very own HAND_TRAIT shot by Agenda on the night, head over to Studio Marvelrys Instagram page to enter their competition.

Agenda met Terry when he walked into the London Review Cake Shop one day, seeking out great food. He found a fellow traveller working with the same passion for exploring ingredients, putting soul and craftsmanship into food, that he invests in his own work as a photographer: deep looking, constant exploration, thoughtful consideration of the components of space, form, light. 

Terry Glover is the restless innovator behind the London Review Cake Shop. Releasing her own beautiful creative work in the same moment – the first edition of a series of the best Cake Shop recipes – Terry was also one of the first people to sit for Agenda’s HAND. series. ‘Terry (AKA super T) is radiating energy that invites, considers, nourishes,’ says Agenda. ‘She truly exudes the “power without force” that I am fascinated by.’

HAND. marks the launch of EDITIONS by Agenda Brown. A creative storyteller, EDITIONS extends his passion for narrative into territories where he shares his inspiration drawn from the human and natural world. The collection explores the natural gestures and angles that sitters find instinctively during the photographic sessions. In doing so, these gestures reveal intimate insight into character and self-expression.

‘I have had a lifelong connection with and fascination for hands,’ says Agenda, ‘Used for everything that we do in daily life, our hands can be the toughest things we possess whilst being used for the most delicate operations, their tactile sensitivity capable of detecting a single hair.’

This balance of strength and sensitivity is a metaphor for human nature, Agenda believes: ‘There is a universal truth in hands that expands on the idea of narrative and communication speaking through the body that has been core to my practice. Our hands often speak for us in an unselfconscious way, to join bits of conversation together, punctuate emotion, and add layers of expression that shortcut, emphasise and signpost.’

Terry sees her hands as possessing exactly the same potency. ‘I love my hands, I work with them for a living – they are the guns of creativity.’

‘When Agenda and I met I felt an energetic joy and then synergy … For me HAND. is important! As a theme, as a symbol and an energy. And of course, my name, GLOVES … The idea was like a second skin.’