Chartered Accountants Hill Vellacott sponsored I MUST NOT WRITE POETRY IN CLASS, an exhibition of paintings by Paul Yates at the Tom Caldwell Gallery as part of Belfast Festival at Queen’s University, 2007. The TABULA RASA series of blackboard paintings was inspired by an incident at Yates’s high school when as a young teenager he was expelled for writing a poem during a mathematics examination and forced to write on a black board one hundred times, I MUST NOT WRITE POETRY IN CLASS. Less than a week later the poem concerned was broadcast on BBC Radio by Sam Hanna Bell and Yates was reinstated at his school.
‘The most unusual exhibition at this year’s festival, drawing record attendances, is by Paul Yates. The key work is TABULA RASA, twenty four feet long and five feet deep, a masterly orchestration of reimagined blackboard imagery and the biggest painting ever shown at the Tom Caldwell Gallery.’ Jenny Lee, Irish News.
