Playing Away

Photographs by Neville Gabie

8 May – 17 July 2004

Put your best foot forward and make your way to Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum. Here you will be able to see some of the world’s most ingenious football posts recorded by Neville Gabie in his stunning photographs.

Each photograph tells a story about its location and proves that football truly is universal; it is the game every young boy wants to play. By looking at Neville Gabie’s photographs it becomes evident that people have relied on what is available locally for making their posts. In many instances materials have been recycled, for example twigs in Botswana and telegraph poles in Buenos Aires; in other cases painting the posts on a brick wall has been carried out.

Neville Gabie’s interest in goalposts began whilst making sculpture in various rural locations in South Africa. He began to notice wooden goalposts set up against the stark landscape and became fascinated as to how they were fixed together and at the imaginative solutions people had come up with to fix a crossbar to two uprights.

Neville Gabie was born in South Africa, after training at St Martins, London, Hull College of Art and the Royal College of Art, he took up a Sculpture Fellowship at Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education and his base today is in Stroud.

He works both as a sculptor and photographer, has shown his work internationally and has collaborated with other artists and writers on various projects of national acclaim, for example FURTHER Up in the Air. Curated by Leo Fitzmaurice, this project invited 18 artists/writers to work in response to the last tower block on an estate in North Liverpool.

A programme of events at the art gallery and in the community have been planned, some working in partnership with Cheltenham Town Football Club.

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