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Flat Time House presents a unique exhibition of work by two artistic visionaries of South London whose art embodied their attempts to connect with the universal. Latham lived and worked at 210 Bellenden Road in Peckham for 23 years until his death in 2006. Spare grew up in Kennington and later lived around the Walworth Road and Brixton. He survived a bomb that destroyed his home and studio during the Blitz and died later, at home in Brixton, in 1956. Both artists dedicated themselves to lifelong idiosyncratic philosophical investigations; one through the occult, the other through science.

Spare developed a personal magic which connects the bodily self and conscious mind - the 'Zos' - through the unconscious to a more complex state called the 'Kia', which describes something like the whole, or the "fertile void behind existence" (Phil Baker, Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London's Lost Artist). Latham's Flat Time Theory sets out a similar relationship between the personal and the universal by allowing the simultaneous existence of more than one 'type of time': the time of momentary, lived experience (the 'specious present') coexisting with the void-like 'omnipresent atemporal score' of the universe. Unlike Spare's system of magic, Latham's theory was offered up beyond the individual, as a salve for all imaginable societal and intellectual differences.

Spare and Latham were also striving, through very different means, to unite language and action; to create a language which would directly correspond to or embody that which it was attempting to describe. Spare used sigils: distillations of words or phrases into graphic ciphers which he employed in his personal magic. He developed a process whereby the sigil (representing a will or desire) bypassed the conscious mind through a practice akin to meditation. Once 'forgotten' or lost to the conscious mind, the sigil would germinate in the fertile ground of the unconscious and, at some future time, make manifest the initial desire. 

For Latham, the very structure and form of language was divisive and inadequate, obscuring the actions and events it attempted to describe. Much of his work is an attempt to convey his ideas through a non-verbal idiom. He developed a strong visual language that included the spray gun, canvas, glass, wires and pipes, and books. In his titling, and later in his theoretical writings, Latham employed an experimental approach to language; playing with its form by means of wordplay, reversals, and corruptions in order to mold it more closely to the nature of things. The exhibition includes a series of works which Latham made during a placement with the Scottish Office in the mid-1970s, which express ideas about time and perspective through a non-verbal or pre-verbal form. From aerial photography of West Lothian's shale heaps or 'bings' (monumental mounds of industrial waste) Latham identified the form of a female torso in the landscape, with breasts and vagina and with her heart splayed out in the landscape adjacent. He called this 'automatic sculpture' the Niddrie Woman and it became a recurring emblem in his work. The large hanging canvas depicts the Niddrie Woman and surrounding landscape from the ground.

Biographically, the artists have a lot in common: a reticence to engage with the art establishment or the commercial art market; superficial correspondences with the work of their contemporaries but isolation by force of their ideas. The artistic genius of both these artists was, in the main, recognised by their peers, even if the subject of their work was not entirely understood. 

In spite of this, discussion of Spare's practice has largely related to arcana and magic, despite his training in fine art and early mainstream successes. Conversely, Latham's work has been understood primarily in relation to the conceptual art practices of the 1960s and 70s. This exhibition broadens these perspectives, presenting their work in the context of two parallel experimental practices.