Brutopia

Leo Walton 2025

A community exhibition

To those who live here, Bruton is our home — the sum of our collective experiences, whatever they may be. But there’s a parallel reality: an island paradise hailed as the new Notting Hill; a playground of the rich and famous; a high street idling with Lamborghinis and Range Rovers; mouth‑watering culinary delights at every turn.

This exhibition holds the two at once: the reality and the illusion, the utopia and the dystopia — and asks, what really is the island paradise of Brutopia?

The Brief

We know what Bruton means to us. But what does the illusion of Bruton mean to you? This exhibition invites 19 local creatives to play with the gap between myth and mud, headlines and hysteria, fantasy and facade, gourmands and Greggs - poking fun at the glossy illusion of the fictional paradise. Will Brutopia live up to the headlines?

What’s your “Brutopia”?

The History Bit

In 1516 Thomas More, High Chancellor to Henry VIII, published a book called ‘Utopia’, an imagined fictional island in which everything was “perfect”. More’s Utopia was a satire, a critique of 16th century society highlighting its absurdities. Not only this, but in some ways it was a work of early science fiction.

More encouraged his readers to question their own world’s flaws and consider alternatives. The pun in the book’s title, ‘Utopia’ literally meaning “no place” but sounding similar to ‘eutopia’, meaning “good place”, suggests that the search for this island paradise is elusive, even non-existent.

More’s Utopia would popularise the idea of imagining parallel realities. Every utopia contains a dystopia, an illusion where nothing is perfect.

Different types of Utopia?

More’s book, in some ways a work of early science fiction, gave rise to a whole new genre of writing. Judging from that literature, there are really two kinds of utopia. There are carnivalesque societies in which, instead of working, everyone will drink, feast and copulate from dawn to dusk.

There are also more austere utopias, in which everything is odourless and antiseptic, intolerably streamlined and sensible.