Cally Trench’s Board Games

1 October to 31 December 2011
John Radcliffe Hospital, Link Gallery 

Board Games devised, designed and made by Cally Trench

1 October 2011 to 31 December 2011, The Link Gallery, John Radcliffe Hospital

Are you ready to steal vegetables, go on a shopping spree, or gamble with people’s lives? Cally Trench is showing images of her board games - Shopping Spree, Vegetable Thieves, Board Game, and Danger Money - in the Link Gallery.

What makes a board game designed by an artist so special? It is not only the design, although each of the games is hand-crafted. Shopping Spree comes with a whole store of lovingly created items – clocks, washing machines, TV sets and piles of designer clothes. Vegetable Thieves includes carefully crafted beds of cabbages and carrots. Danger Money and Shopping Spree have bank notes in their own currencies.

But it is the content of the games that makes them different. Cally Trench's games are ethically confusing and slightly subversive; they make overt the aggression implicit in apparently innocent pastimes such as Monopoly, which also activate a certain viciousness in the players.

Cally Trench has acted as an impresario for her board games at venues including the Charles Dickens Museum and the Hackney Wicked Festival.

Cally Trench lives in High Wycombe, and she has a wide portfolio of artistic interests. Her work includes – in addition to board games – painting, drawing, timelapse films and books. Her first degree was in Chemistry at Wadham College, Oxford (with a thesis on the Philosophy of the Language of Science). She then worked as an Administrative Officer in Hong Kong for two and a half years, and has been a practising artist since she returned to England in 1981. In 2007 she completed an MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.

The exhibition programme at the Link Gallery has been developed to show the stories behind the art, to reveal the processes by which artists create work, and to encourage the viewer to explore more of Oxford’s exciting contemporary art scene.

There is a new exhibition at the Link Gallery every three months. 

The exhibition is curated by the Art Consultancy Notfamousyet and supported by Oxford City Council.

For more information or images please contact:

Gabriele Dangel

Notfamousyet Art Consultancy
Tel: 07867900746

info@notfamousyet.co.uk