Last Christmas

Last Christmas is an exhibition by Becky Shaw, at Black Box Gallery, UCA Farnham November 25 2025-12 January 2026. It focuses on Christmas iconography, drawn from the research project Justheat. By bringing together works from Justheat and a focus on Christmas, the exhibition explores the problems of time, nostalgia, culture and our relationship to the future.

UK Christmas cards, and other festive merchandise have remarkably consistent imagery. They conjure a world of cottages enveloped in thick snow, with deer and robins staring between trees covered in twinkling frost. Amidst the snow are spiralling plumes of chimney smoke funnelled from roaring wood and coal fires inside. We don’t know if UK Christmases ever looked like this, but they certainly don’t look like most people’s UK Christmas now.

Despite the gulf between dream and reality, these images are still pervasive and heartfelt. They conjure a yearning for something glowing and ineffable, a past of deep connections and shared experience. Other cultures have similar iconographies (for Christmas and other festivals) showing how the fireside and its representation may be often tied to national representations.

When we tell stories of the past, we do so through the lens of our present, and we ‘live’ with our histories. To explore this non-linear experience of time, Last Christmas brings together a series of deliberately rough animations that physically play with how ‘transition’- the movement from one point to another- happens. These diverse films are accompanied by a series of lenticular postcards that visitors are invited to pick up, to try to find the exact moment when the past becomes the present, and a free zine. These works are presented within the ‘stage set’ of a Christmas fireside, to invite us to think about how keeping warm is an invisible backdrop to our daily performances.