Jamie Seymour: The Sick Rose

The Sick Rose is a solo exhibition by artist Jamie Seymour. Taking its title from William Blake’s dark and mythic poem, the exhibition brings together new paintings, drawings and sculptures. Roses with faces, stiff-necked swans, and cartoon-coloured forms appear throughout—symbols that reflect experiences of queer anxiety and the pressures of being seen. Part of Lboro Lates at Modern Painters, New Decorators in Loughborough.

William Blake, the 18th-century English poet and artist, often used symbolism to explore themes of love, power and control. In his short, unsettling poem The Sick Rose, Blake describes a flower made sick by an invisible worm—diseased from the inside out. Roses appear again and again in Seymour’s work: blooming, blushing, watched. Painted eyes peer from canvases and drawings, acting as both anxious self-portrait and emblem of surveillance. Blake’s words become a mirror—his warnings about social control, repression and tenderness still resonating today.

On shelves and ledges, a cast of small sculptural assemblages made from found materials stand awkwardly in place. Covered in glitter, oil paint, and debris collected from the street, these creatures feel both celebratory and discarded—clumsy and tender in equal measure. Alongside pencil-scrawled lines of poetry across the facade, they help to create a visual and symbolic world that is lyrical, tactile and strange.