Gallery 

Exhibition
21.11.2026 – 23.01.2027

Opening
Friday 20th November, 6–9pm 
6.30pm: Flesh, Wax & Glass: Three Holy Weeks in Calabria Film Screening
8pm: Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child Performance by Coby Sey

Open 
Friday and Saturday, 12–5pm

David Dale Gallery are delighted to host Flesh, Wax & Glass: Three Holy Weeks in Calabria, a new solo exhibition by George Finlay Ramsey. The exhibition features the eponymous artist’s film, developed over four years of filming and research, which focuses on a southern Italian flagellant ritual and a family’s process of mourning.

In Calabria, southern Italy, a man named Saturno is filmed performing a bloody Easter ritual for the 33rd time. One week later he suddenly dies. Flesh, Wax & Glass pays witness to his family’s process of mourning, his wife Silvana’s crisis of faith, and the awkward magic of becoming entangled in the lives of others.

In the Easter procession in Nocera Terinese, Calabria, men hit the backs of their legs with pads of cork, encrusted with 13 shards of broken glass, in a secret pact with the statue of the Virgin Mary. Shot on 16mm the film is part essay, part poem, part psychedelic ethnography, and takes a playful and critical look at the relationship between documentarist and subject.

During the show, David Dale Gallery will become a hushed place of reverence, to reflect the Chiesa dell’Annunziata where the statue of the Madonna is housed. The projection screen becomes a floral altarpiece, and the further fragments of film works allow multiple years of the procession to unfold spatially. Referencing Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964), the work features a haunting rendition of ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’ by Coby Sey.

Previous iterations of the project have been presented at Whitechapel Gallery and the Barbican following a shortlisting for the 2025 Jarman Award.

Commissioned by PAF Olomouc and supported by Creative Scotland.