About the Film

This gallery exhibition documentary film follows a show called Feast of Fools, which I was commissioned to film in 2009 at the Fishmarket Gallery in Northampton. The exhibition took its name from a medieval tradition of sanctioned misrule, a period before Lent when power was briefly turned upside down, children became bishops for a day, and fools were crowned kings. The show carried that same spirit throughout, an invitation to take things seriously by not taking them seriously at all.

A 25-Foot Frog

Christopher Davies’ contribution was impossible to miss, a huge frog mounted high on the gallery wall, grown from what had started life as a small oil painting. In its new form it became something closer to a green gargoyle, absurd and slightly monstrous, looming over the whole show. There was some debate at the time about whether the scale was too much for the space, but that felt like part of the point. It wasn’t just a visual joke, it was a genuine disruption, a creature of misrule doing exactly what the exhibition’s title promised.

Stella Capes and Max Attenborough brought their own versions of the same idea, each finding a different way into chaos with intent. The old bus station turned gallery suited all of it, an odd, echoing space where the work seemed to loom, crouch and perch in corners rather than sit politely on plinths.

Don Letts and the Politics of Carnival

One of the highlights of the opening was a screening of Carnival!, a documentary by Don Letts, who visited the gallery in person to introduce it. He spoke about the political history of carnival, not simply as celebration but as a form of resistance, a way people in Notting Hill, the Caribbean and elsewhere have used costume, satire and music to reclaim space and challenge authority. His reflections reframed the whole exhibition for me, grounding its playfulness in something more serious underneath.

Making a Gallery Exhibition Documentary Film

I was using my Sony Z5 at the time, one of the first proper video cameras I owned, and Feast of Fools was one of the projects that changed how I approached filming exhibitions. Gallery work asks for a slower, more observational rhythm than an interview or a live event. You are not just recording objects, you are trying to capture how a space actually breathes, so I leaned into slow pans, ambient sound and gentle tracking shots rather than working from a fixed shot list. I also started paying real attention to how daylight changed the character of a piece through the day, sometimes leaning into that, sometimes working around it.

It has stayed with me as one of the first times I trusted that instinct properly, filming less like someone documenting objects and more like someone trying to hold onto a feeling. That balance between structure and intuition is still something I look for on every gallery exhibition documentary film I make.

Looking back, Feast of Fools was one of the shows that helped me work out what kind of filmmaker I actually wanted to be. I did not want to simply record what was on the walls. I wanted the film itself to sit in a quiet dialogue with the work, picking up on the same mix of play and seriousness that made the exhibition worth watching in the first place.

About the Fishmarket Gallery

The Fishmarket Gallery occupied a former bus station in Northampton, and for a time hosted contemporary art exhibitions that made good use of its unusual, echoing space. Feast of Fools ran there in 2009, bringing together Christopher Davies, Stella Capes and Max Attenborough alongside Don Letts’ screening of Carnival!. You can find out more about Don Letts’ work at donletts.com.