Warning! May contain traces of elephant

A conceptually ambiguous blog post title, for a conceptually ambiguous art exhibition! 

In writing about Hestercombe’s latest exhibition, ‘Materiality:Provisional States’ I felt it would be legitimately wrong to document my thoughts without first addressing the all-important, but seldom overlooked, elephant in the room. That is, I was taught by one of the artists in this exhibition, Sarah Bennett, during my Masters in Fine Art with Plymouth University and have had the pleasure of knowing, another artist in the show, Megan Calver. There is an element of bias, that whilst one would try analyse the work objectively, I cannot to some extent ignore that my opinions are influenced by those relationships. It is a scenario that I had never previously given much heed to in any of my writing, how the possible impact of knowing or not knowing the artist has on my personal interpretation of their work. Where does the writer's responsibility lie, to the integrity of themselves, the artists whose work they write about or that of the reader who possibly deserves the most honest opinion. I think part of the problem is there aren't enough people writing about these sorts of exhibitions so that readers have much choice!

This also relates to a book I have been recently reading, “What it Means to Write About Art” that documents a series of interviews with art writers/critics on the practice of art writing/art criticism. It has been fascinating to learn of different writers’ thoughts on how they address this same scenario,

“It’s hard. When I write about somebody I don’t know. I almost try to imagine them. And when I write about somebody I do know, I try to forget them…When I started out, I didn’t know if nay of it mattered – I couldn’t imagine that I actually had an audience -so felt completely free to say whatever I wanted. When you first start writing, you don’t know if people are reading, and you don’t know if anybody is going to care. And then, after a while, you realise people do care…Basically, I’ve always felt my job as a critic is to try and be me and figure out who I am…It’s those basic, immediate reactions that fuel your thinking and your writing…There’s a danger of over complicating things.” -Jed Pearl in an interview with Jarrett Earnest “What it means to Write About Art”

Philippa Lawrence - Trace (2018)

I have tried to keep some of those sentiments in mind when writing this. It gets even worse if one considers that I was also taught by the curator and know some of the technicians that also helped install the show, but that’s Somerset for you! There is, however, an artist I definitely do not know in the exhibition, Philippa Lawrence and it is her work with which we are first greeted at the top of the stairs in the form of an uprooted tree stump. The top of the stump, where it was sliced, has been polished to an irresistibly tempting-to touch by hand, high-sheen. The contrast between the roughness and brutal-act of sawing presented against the considered care with which the act of polishing wood has associated with craft or objects intended for consideration/keeping. An idea Lawrence continues in a similar piece in the form of a log pile, titled ‘Shift’ also exhibited. Initially we see a pile of logs associated with the practical connotations of being a resource for fuel and on closer inspection their polished spec, where each log has been cut makes them objects of consideration or an implied sense of preciousness. Lawrence has worked alongside the woodland management team, as have each of the artists in this exhibition, engaging with the site of Hestercombe House/Gardens, its history and the different skilled people who manage it today. In ‘Trace’ brightly coloured enamel profiles off the tops of tree stumps from around Hestercombe are displayed together on the (appropriately wooden) floor of one of the gallery spaces. It is visually quite minimal and could not be more clinically detached in its man-made fabrication from the original tree from which it was formed (a statement in itself). Each stump becoming an island or fingerprint-like replica of the original tree and the trace of the action which led to its current form.

Sarah Bennett - Cultivatar (2018) 35mm slides of 21 silverpoint drawings, slide viewers

Another artist who likes capturing traces of human encounters and actions within her work is Sarah Bennett, who for Hestercombe has created a series of responses, the majority of which are linked in using the material of silver. Multiple reflection points inspired by Bampfylde’s pear pond are drawn with photography and silver nitrate, in ‘Cultivatar’ (2018) silverpoint is used to recreate meticulous drawings of seeds presented in viewfinders strategically placed to great effect in the windows overlooking the gardens themselves (so that seed and plant can be seen simultaneously) and again in embellishing a row of handheld garden tools.  Now partially rendered in silver the tools are in affect useless for their original purpose but take on a preserved sense of status that the quality of silver brings elevating the tools from their more humble connotations in being originally used for the maintenance of the estate. The cheeky part of me cannot omit that I take some small nugget of narcissistic delight in that my own tool-related work may have had some influence on the use of tools here?! Whilst I have long accepted that I clearly cannot monopolise the use of tools in anyone’s art, I equally in this instance cannot deny myself a wry smile of amusement. If Hestercombe ever wants a more expressive response to gardening tools then you know where to find me! 

Sarah Bennett -Siolfur (2018) Silver plating on found tools

Continuing with ideas she first started exploring in 2015’s exhibition, ‘Second Site’ Megan Calver works with notions of taste in particular to, one of Hestercombe’s founding gardeners, Gertrude Jekyll’s ‘exacting attitude towards colour and language’ presented through scans of scorched blooms (flowers grown at Hestercombe, picked and pressed by an image-scanner) viewed on tables from above like botanical specimens. The invigilators of the exhibition having the licence to routinely edit which ones are seen and not but covering them, their own ‘tastes’ becoming a part of the work. The use of language and description of colour, in particular to fire/flame links well to a previous work by Calver about Salvia seeds described on their packaging as ‘Blaze of Fire’ (and incidentally loathed by Jekyll if we are to relate it back to ideas of ‘taste’). Calver’s other interventions such as additions to the light-box signage in the house's former fire brigade control-room and coals in the fireplaces in each of the galleries are subtle enough to go unnoticed by many but are quiet statements in keeping with ideas around fire and the context that Hestercombe House was formally the call-centre to the fire brigade. It is rewarding when one spots them and for want of a better phrase, ‘gets it’ but I am unsure how hard many visitors may be willing to work to reach that point.

For me it really highlights my reservation with the exhibition as a whole, that it feels a bit too cerebral. When one compares it to what one reads about each artist having individually undergone very investigative inquiries in talking to people, looking through archives and working on site around Hestercombe; a process which I imagine as being very 'warm', human, interactive and enriching  to then each produce work which is largely quite detached from the reality of those experiences/engagement and make work that is by comparison cold and sterile to the point of being so considered and laboured in its though processes that something of those original encounters with which we as the audience can identify with is lost. In example, I do not personally get a sense of the encounter of reflections on a pond in Bennett's 'Pear Pond 1' from what appears to be an overly process-engineered oval photograph, for me it does not offer anything different that I would not better obtain from looking at the real thing or offer a different insight that photography can allow. There is a point to be made here perhaps about how close or far does an artist’s relation to their original subject/source matter in how the work is received and understood by their audience? I expect it is subjective. For the purposes of this exhibition however, I would have liked to have seen some more emotive/expressive responses to counterbalance the largely conceptual nature of the show. I am often concerned that as artists we tend to over-think or complicate things, so ideas become so refined and detached from where they originally started that we loose the sense of what it actually is to be a embodied, thinking, feeling human responding to a subject and have yet to see an exhibition by a contemporary artist at Hestercombe that really celebrates that. Addressing the elephant in the room, what it says on the tin -in my opinion stating the obvious isn't always a bad thing.

‘Materiality: provisional states’ is on until 24^th February 2019

https://www.hestercombe.com/event/exhibition-materiality-provisional-states/

Divine

'the diviner' 2018

In every sense of the word (and for reasons that will also hopefully become clear) Helen Sear’s exhibition which opened last Friday at Hestercombe Gallery, is divine. Least alone because the show opens with her most recent photographic work, titled ‘The Diviner’ (2018) spectacularly displayed on the gallery’s nineteenth century staircase [pictured]. An epically-sized series of three prints of willow trees taken over two years chronicled as their roots grew and dried with the rising and falling of the water where they grew. Their roots adorned by the artist, with flowers to denote their likeness to skirts; a fitting tribute, in the absence of any actual period-dressed skirted ladies, to the grandeur of Hestercombe’s ballroom-like setting. Many proms, in-fact my own having taken place here some years ago (though I never recall myself or anyone else wearing anything that quite matches the scale that Sear’s tree-skirts convey)! The trees divine water through their roots and mirror-image both their workings above as below, intentionally or not, allude an interesting insight into the dual-nature of Sear’s work depicting her subject matter through multiple viewpoints,  the known and the unknown, both here rendered visible. Its subject matter, scale and situ within the gallery, along with its use of colour and play of illusion through mirror-imagery really set the tone for the other visually intriguing and intellectually beguiling works exhibited. 

“Sear has always, it seems, been interested in looking with, looking round and looking through as she is in looking at.”

'stack' 2015

Sitting on the periphery between photography and fine art the works on show in ‘prospect refuge’ are united in being influenced by Sear’s interest in nature and our 'human/animal relationships within it'. The title of the show influenced by a concept from natural history writer, Jay Appleton whose concept of ‘prospect refuge’ states, ‘the perceived beauty of a landscape is directly linked to human survival’. Personally speaking, I am unsure if the images I see consciously trigger thoughts of survival, though I do find many of the stills from Sear’s film-based pieces, with their strong use of colour and focus on textures (a curtain, a net, light through trees) to be beautiful in an aesthetic sense. Maybe much of what we know of 'survival' in relation to the natural landscape has been lost or is now only ingrained in our subconscious? I am unsure, but this psychological-edge to the work creates a double-take in how it is perceived by the viewer. The film/sound piece ‘wahaha biota’ (2018) made for The Forestry Commission England that shows the planting and processing of trees is an example of how Sear’s work creates a sense of intrigue and beauty through green-filtered scenes of meadows and dappled forests in contrast to the isolation and strange sounds that also give these places an edge of being dark, primal and slightly foreboding. Though the overall impression I get is that for what is mostly an exhibition using photography it is surprising just how painterly, immersive and in some cases sculptural the images are. 

The exhibition features photographic and film-based works from 2015 onwards with the implied cross-over between sculpture and photography being an idea that the artist herself acknowledges within one of the first pieces you encounter in the gallery. Titled ‘Stack’, [pictured above] a pile of stacked logs is displayed on a large scale, which in-turn is also physically sliced and stacked vertically as an image along the gallery wall forming a visual blockade that is physically felt as well as seen,

‘a meeting of photography and sculpture, or treating the photographic image as sculptural,...’

In a visual-sense these logs are a series of cylinders piled onto one another, but it also raises feelings of deforestation, man's relationship with the forest, ideas of the homestead and stacking logs used for fires and so on. The doubling-up of the captured-moment of an image of stacked logs versus the stacking of the physical image itself calls into question the visual play between illusion and perception.  A theme explored across a number of Sear’s works from when she exhibited in the Welsh pavilion in the Venice Biennale in 2015. 

'...caetera fumus' 2015  

One of several pieces from the Venice Biennale exhibited at Hestercombe, titled ‘...caetera fumus’ reads almost like a transcription of the original painting of St Sebastian [1490] it was inspired from by Andrea Mantegna.  Instead of a figure the landscape becomes the protagonist, a bright yellow field in contrast to red twigs become symbols for blooded arrows and a light-box becomes a modern-day interpretation of creating a glaze in paint and almost celestial-like luminosity associated with religious imagery. In the same room, the curation of the quote, ‘Nihil nisi divinum stabile est. Caetera fumus’ [which translates as ‘Nothing is stable if not divine, the rest is smoke’] displayed, in my mind rather wittily, above the fireplace and refers to the impermanence of all things. I am fortunate to have seen these works before in Venice where the context of this work was closely tied to the building it was shown in, however, I feel that the work has more autonomy in the context of Hestercombe away from the heat and saturation of art in Venice where it can be contemplated quietly and more fully than I allowed time for previously. 

Colour and the reference to painting (as we have already had with sculpture) are also present in another series of photographs called ‘brand 1’ and ‘brand 2’. You could almost take these images on first glance to be paintings, stains or rubbings. 

“My use of colour is also to do with a convergence of the synthetic and the natural, using heightened colour to explore relationships between light and pigment, painting and photography.”

I think they are a photograph of a marking on a tree, but for me the uncertainty and place it fits between being photo and non-photo, is it a documentation of a moment in time or is it merely an image? Are these colours natural or manmade, real or unreal? Are questions what make these and many of Sear’s images worth revisiting.

“Her process of production often suggest a series of veils or membranes that may be alternately piled up and peeled away...Rather than merely giving us the world, or giving us to it, the photographic act is an overlayering , of times and places, signs and sensations.”

'the beginning and the end of things' 2015

The projection piece, shown on the floor ‘the beginning and the end of things’ (2015) is another example where our sense of perception is skewed and how Sear adapts her medium of film and photography to create something that (like ‘Stack’) her audience almost 'physically' encounters rather than merely 'looks-at', as one tries to work out what this unfamiliar amoeba-like changing coloured thing is. Her work has been linked to ideas within Surrealism and I can see why within this work particularly as it conveys an ever-changing puddle within which the trees and sky are reflected but at the same time are an illusion of the real-thing, an Alice in Wonderland-like portal to another world... It is real and unreal at the same time, uncanny, slightly trippy and strange but oddly also more engaging because of those things than had it been static or on the wall. Once again there is also something very painterly/impressionistic in its fluidity. It is not the only piece in the exhibition either where Sear combines new technology along with nature/natural images drones are used in the film piece, 'moments of capture' (2016).

There is more to be seen in this exhibition than I have referred to here in what is also worth noting is Sear's first solo show but second time exhibiting at Hestercombe, having shown work in 2015's 'Double Take'. Then as now, I feel that her use of colour, modes of display and references to painting/fine art is more exciting, inventive and engaging than I have felt about a lot of photography as a medium previously. It is great to have that perception challenged as it is also worth reiterating how great it is to see these works on my doorstep and I would encourage others to do the same. 

Helen Sear’s 'prospect refuge hazard 2' is on at Hestercombe Gallery until October 28^th

https://www.hestercombe.com/event/prospect-refuge-hazard-2-by-helen-sear/

Quotes sourced from: Drake, D (2015) Helen Sear: ...the rest is smoke, Ffotogallery Wales Limited: Cardiff 

Black and Gold

Not all that glitters is gold, but you may be fooled by Hestercombe Gallery’s latest exhibition, ‘Cultivation: Points of vantage’ that features a surprising array of deceptively dazzling (albeit monochromatic) surfaces. From the glossy sheen of George Shaw’s enamel painted depictions of haunting urban places, John Newling’s gold-leafed plant specimens, Mary Griffiths’ iridescent, meticulously and intrinsically worked graphite drawings that sparkle and shimmer, Anna Barriball’s pencil rubbing of a stained-glass window rendered surprisingly light, to the reflective gloss of Mary McIntyre’s misty landscape photography. It is not a colourful exhibition whose slightly sombre tones provide a stark contrast to the seasonal colours outside in the gardens, but it will make you think; about the places, the vantage points from which we view and interact with landscape through our windows, the things we grow, the towns we live in, the places we leave behind....

Anna Barriball Sunrise/Sunset (2008) Pencil on paper.*

Things are what they first appear and not, forcing us to look beyond the surface of these works and investigate more closely so that new meanings are revealed. Griffiths’ and Barriball’s drawings both reflect the light, yet when viewed from different angles and in different light levels reveal their very grey, dark surfaces. Properties created due to the graphite from which they are made. I have a lot of time for Barriball’s work*, they have a pleasing trompe l’oeil affect in being both a life-size rendering (in ‘Sunrise/Sunset’ 2008 it is in fact a rubbing) of the original object, a window, a fireplace, a door; but in a material that makes them useless or a trace of what they once were. The stained-glass window’s main function to allow the emitting of light through its coloured glass pannels is now blackened-out as a grey, lead-like replica. It is now functionless, but reveals something new about its surface, its design and as already mentioned, the duality of its now opaque but still shiny surface that retains some of its connection to its original purpose.

Mariele Neudecker Everything is Important and Nothing Matters at All

(2009) Mixed media.

Similarly, Mariele Neudecker’s sculpture, ‘Everything is Important and Nothing Matters at All’ (2009), blurs with the distortion between reality and fiction through a miniaturised maquette of an abandoned dwelling through which a video of the natural world can be glimpsed (when viewing through the sculpture from different angles). It is an almost movie-like fabrication but one so accurate that it forces your eyes to become the camera; whether we chose to focus on the details in the scene that transports us in our mind’s-eye into thinking that it could be real or look beyond the sculpture and its presentation on a table within a gallery that breaks the illusion turning it back into the realms of fiction. This piece sits well alongside Mary McIntrye’s ‘Romanticism’ evoking, misty veiled landscapes which have something equally cinematic and suspenseful about them; scenes which are animated by the absence or anticipation of missing their actors.

John Newling Value, Coin, Note and Eclipse (2006) Pressed and guilded

Jersey Kale plants

John Newling’s work ‘Value, Coin, Note and Eclipse’ (2006) uses gold-leaf applied to,…well, leaves! The irony is not wasted on me and speaking from a purely aesthetic point of view is a visual treat for the eyes! Their museum-style mode of presentation is of great appeal to me. Made from Jersey Kale, planted and grown by the artist himself, whose leaves were removed at different stages of growth to create a horticultural wall that documents time. The gold-leaf was used to explore ideas of value and currency in relation to natural processes and, for me, becomes symbolic of the time we choose to invest/or not into our relationship with nature and challenges our perceptions of the preservation of life versus decay. Which do we value more, the plant whilst it is alive, the resource it gives us in death or the reminder of life it gives in being preserved in death? The idea of the land as a resource is also explored in film by Mikhail Karikis. In, ‘Children of Unquiet’ (2013-14) Karikis uses the sound of whistles and whispers performed by children with imagery of the volcanic landscape, to tell the story of the first geothermic power station to be built in Italy during the 1970s and its effect on the people who live there.

Mikhail Karikis Children of the Unquiet (2013-14) Video

All the exhibitions at Hestercombe, as we have come to expect (and perhaps rightly so) have some sort of connection to the natural world, land or the history/grounds context in which the gallery is situated. The connection the works in this exhibition have with land is relatively clear. If we were instead to take the title of this exhibition, to mean ‘cultivation’ in the sense of the none land-based definition of a, ‘process of trying to acquire or develop a quality or skill’ it rather nicely fits with what the role of the artist is, as a sort-of cultivator of ideas, processes or techniques which is none more than present in John Brown’s photographed grasses, sparsely, carefully and meticulously placed to create a natural quality of Chinese calligraphy without the ink. They are even more subtle and quiet compared to much of the other relatively minimal pieces in the exhibition but have a contemplative honesty reminiscent for anyone who has ever picked a stalk of grass and pressed it between two sheets of paper in an attempt to capture its shape and beauty. Proof if were needed that less is often more and a process a means from which the artist explores transcendentalism. Elsewhere, George Shaw’s almost photographic-like quality of painting in ‘The Next Big Thing’ (2010) is an exact testimony to the art of acquiring a skill and using it to capture a moment in time, in Shaw’s paintings often of semi-urban abandoned-looking places that might no longer exist.

In an exhibition that does not require laborious contemplation to be enjoyed but whose works quietly invite the tilling over of ideas through their seductive surfaces or use of the double-take; those who take the time to look, think and look again may reap the rewards of the ideas these artists have sown.

‘Cultivation: Points of vantage’ can be seen at Hestercombe Gallery until July 1^st. https://www.hestercombe.com/event/cultivation-points-vantage/ 

Find out about the Seminar happening around this exhibition on June 5th here:

https://www.hestercombe.com/event/seminar-points-vantage/

http://www.artscouncilcollection.org.uk/

*Image sourced from: https://frieze.com/tags/anna-barriball

*See a post I wrote about Barriball’s work in 2012 here: http://somersetartworksblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/thoughts-on-anna-barriball-exhibition.html

Words copyright of Natalie Parsley.© 

Tasteless

Buffet d’art at Hestercombe gallery is a smorgasbord of buffet-sized sculpture, live art, film, sound, light and painting from 45 different artists, all of whom have been invited to bring work that can be ‘perused on a plinth’.
 

“The show is a meleè of mismatched yet aspiring works, some with delusions of grandeur, others grubby with spillage and monotonous repetition, set to a medley of smooth and relaxing music, designed to whet the senses and heighten your experience of these buffet-inspired memories.”

An unusual exhibition warrants an unusual response so I am writing mine in the form of a buffet table conversation between three people with very opposing views as they attempt to digest what lies before them.

Person X: What ill conceived manner of cacophonous, inane, conceited  tat is all this?! Something that can only best resemble a turd, a giant band aid, a woman urinating, a load of old cigarettes... A blue stick! A cupcake, that as far as I can see is unedible!

Person Y: It is safe to assume that you liked it then?

Person X: Liked it! If I wanted to see a load of something of nothing, I’d have gone to [disclaimer we could not include the name of the gallery here, but you know the one]!

Person Y: I think any reaction is a good one, besides its playful, an example of bringing together these disparate, strange and creative elements. Their variety and unexpected nature of viewing works on and under a giant table is visually a lot to look at in a small curated space.

Georgina Starr

Person Z: I don’t get it.

Person X: It’s taking the p**s is what it is. A cheap way for artists to boost their CVs and for galleries to they’ve exhibited work by a wide array of artists.

Person Y: Cynically, perhaps yes. But where else do you get the opportunity to see work like this, by artists whose big works you may be familiar with, it offers a glimpse into the playful and other creative outputs within their practice.

Person X: I wouldn’t want to see any more of some of it!

Person Y: It is all here, lights, coloured liquids, music, strange undefinable forms, waves, a diorama of a swimming pool, a revolving pot, recycled entities, felt, paper, foam. A village of tiny people, projection, a yellow baseball cap!

Person Y: Maybe you are taking it too seriously. Think of Dada, Surrealism, artist’s studios and the ‘real, lived process’ of what it means to be an artist and make art. Is it not at times inquisitive, spontaneous, rebellious in its non-conformity? See this as a buffet, a taste of lots of variables out of many. So many that we may not have time to savour and understand each one individually for long before moving onto the next thrill, the next surprise, the next thing that may upset, delight or confuse us. Some are intentionally small things, but with grand ambitions that the status of the plinth provides. You could see it as ironic or tongue-in-cheek.

Reith Bowler

Person Z: I don’t get it.

Person Y: What would you expect or want to see in Somerset?

Person X: .....I suppose, ...variety. Something contemporary.

Person Y: Exactly!

Person X: But I am not sure I get the ‘joke’ here, if that was what was intended. I am not sure if pointlessness for the sake of pointlessness either does anything to help raise the bar or what is it challenging or prove?

Person Z: ...I really do not get it.

Person X: The only people this will appeal to are those hipster, do-gooder, lefty, decaffeinated-skim-latte drinking mediocrities blinded to the facts that what this truly is, a waste of space! 

Peggy Atherton

Person Z: “Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.” Susan Sontag

Person X: Even if this is art, which isn’t quite the same as what we are arguing here, what this is, is still not good art. This is a bunch of stuff masquerading as being important because it is made by an entitled, insider bunch of artists.

Person Y: Isn’t that what all art is. Who decides what is good or bad, it’s all subjective. What is the inside? These are old issues. It is all too easy to grow cynical of these things; I think that the connection it creates between artists, curators and gallery spaces is a good one. I read recently that, “Reviewers like to feel they are above a work of art. If it puzzles them or if they are intimidated they are more than likely to trash it.” Could not the same be said of art audiences?

Person X: ....

Person Y: Though I do often wonder if it is an apathy towards our failings to engage and discuss this sort of art with other people or ourselves and honestly, that causes these strong opinions. How often is it that we merely tolerate a lot of art that we feel is bad because criticism is difficult to express as it can be to ingest. This isn’t good for either party. Audiences are always being forced to be open-minded and try new things but do they have the same power of influence on the curators who's shows they visit and consume?

David Cotterrell

Person Z: I suppose by that comment you are referring to me. I do not understand it but that does not come out of apathy or lack of desire to understand. I am content with just experiencing and viewing it for what it is.

Person X: Well, certainly no apathy here!

Person Y: Maybe it is all a conversation. The pieces brought together from individual artists, arranged in a way so that they ‘talk’ to one another. See it as a series of rhythms and forms, colours and textures that change. Or maybe the point is that it generates us to have the kinds of conversations we are having now.

Person X: Not big enough or isolated enough to be satisfying.

Person Y: I found a couple of things that really stood out for me. I like R J Hinrichson’s pamphlet on creating your own ‘Semi Formal Discussion Networks’. Though as a whole it looked a bit goofy and forced together and I couldn’t appreciate how the different objects related to one another in terms of their space on the ‘table’.

Person Z: I liked Ben Joiner’s piece. It sort-of looked like it was crawling onto the table like a giant fried egg.

Person X: Hmmm, ... I still do not see quite why someone would be willing to waste their time looking at this as they would want to read about it.

Person Y: On that we can agree.

 

 

You too can gorge yourself silly or go on an art detox at Hestercombe Gallery's Buffet d'art, open Sun, 21st May at 11:00 am to Sun, 18th Jun at 5:00 pm http://www.hestercombe.com/event/buffet-dart/

You're in for a big surprise...

“‘Madame Bridgette’ by Clare Woods is another example of an artist enjoying paint as a medium and is one that you really have to see in the flesh to get a sense of its sumptuous colour and thick, intense glossy sheen created by its metal surface and use of gloss/enamel paints.”

 

'Madame Bridgette' (2005)

It isn’t everyday that one gets the opportunity to quote oneself from over ten years ago! This observation was taken from an essay I wrote about the John Moores Painting Prize in 2006. It was my first (of what has become a customary tradition) visit to Liverpool and the Biennial whilst a student in my first year of my Fine Art degree. Fast forward ten years and here I am writing about my third encounter with Clare Woods’ paintings whose solo show has just opened at Taunton’s Hestercombe Gallery. The quote is important, not just sentimentally, nor in its apparent use of stating the obvious, but taps into a time when I knew a lot less about art so was more instinctive and open-minded in my opinions –something that I am ever conscious of trying to in-part retain.  

 

Therefore, I stick by you, slightly grammatically incorrect essay quote from 2006! In that vein I begin (though not promising that the grammar will be much better). Clare Woods is still an artist that explicitly and almost sculpturally enjoys the stuff of paint (incidentally she trained as a sculptor at Bath College of art, once describing herself as 'a frustrated sculptor'). In her earlier work especially, paint is wielded like a sculptural medium; poured, dripped, scraped, smoothed, spread and brushed; these the more gestural of marks made either with brush or left alone to spread and bleed into other colours creating cellular meiosis-like pools, as gloss naturally does when poured onto a flat surface. In other areas of her paintings semi-representational lines and forms are crisply almost ‘cut’ into the surface creating structure and shape against the looser expressive marks. Upstairs in the largest room this is demonstrated with gusto in the devouringly huge (its floor to ceiling high) painting ‘Monster Field’ (2008).

 

'Monster Field' (2008)

The beauty of painting this and many of her early works on aluminium is that the slick, hard surface is perfect for creating those pools of paint and manipulation of it with brush or palette knife, yet possibly what is the most impressive in this work is the intense use of colour and dynamic composition. Some of Wood’s later paintings become more murky and muddy in their colour palette and feel less pleasing visually than the vibrancy and energy of paintings like ‘Monster Field’ (but perhaps offer a truer depiction of natural landscape colours?). They are ‘high’ colour as my friend (a painter) pointed out to me; as though someone has boosted the contrast and intensity settings on a digital image to dangerous levels of distortion. That distortion being another crucial factor in Woods' paintings which are ‘derived from photographs’ and sit mostly in abstraction but have representational forms within them that suggest fences, bracken, shrubbery, trees, hills or plough furrows. These colours, mark making and forms are in-turn composed into an energetic outcome that is almost musical in the way it is rhythmically paced to lead your eye around its surface. If these are influenced and inspired from the natural landscape then they are heightened and ambiguous; open to numerous interpretations from their viewers, but in their passion for paint  and drama seem to fit their being likened to the Romantic tradition of painting.

 

'Cemetery Bends' (2009)

In ‘Cemetery Bends’ (2009) the wavering between abstraction and representation is clearer and with a darker element of moodiness to it that suggests an eerie, strange forest; fantasy mixed with darkness of the  likes of the Brothers Grimm. Although the majority of Woods' paintings are relatively flat they have depth in their layers of applied paint as well as a reflective depth created from the sheen of the enamel and gloss paint which make interesting surfaces to explore for longer. Some of this layering and cutting (referred to earlier) ties Woods' paintings closer to that of the Danish born artist, Per Kirkeby, whose paintings she cites as looking at. I too first remember seeing Per Kikeby’s paintings in a solo exhibition at Tate Modern in 2009, they are heavily inspired by geology, soil and the landscape and in many cases on as an ambitious scale (and even bigger) as Clare Woods. In Kirkeby’s case, some of his paintings almost burry you alive in their enormity and it’s the larger scale Woods’ paintings that I think work best. They envelope the viewer with their glistening surfaces and intimacy of the luxuriousness of the paint, yet at the same time they push you away with areas of hard, flatter grid-like lines and angles that suggest a more desolate vision of landscape than a thriving one.... For a long time I battled with deciding whether Wood’s paintings were too slick or whether I was reading too much into the type of paint rather than looking at the way it was manipulated; because when one looks at the actual painting within them they feel a lot more anxious and intuitive than being dismissed as pretty patterns and I have come to like them more after reading of the artist’s relationship to making her paintings;  “Anxiety and fear are in the background of everything I do...I think that’s what keeps me going there’s always a fear. There’s always a fear of something.”* In this way the work becomes more like reading a Rorschach blot in being open to interpretation.

 

'The Last Best Hope' (2014)

In another room there are a series of works influenced by First World War landscapes and ideas around painters such as Paul Nash; the tension in these being slightly different to that of the more overtly landscape ones. I’d love to know if Clare Woods paints with a title in mind or whether the title comes after? As with these and nearly all her works, the title either anchors or shifts how the work is then viewed. I prefer looking without knowing the title first.

Overall though in this retrospective, I think I like the earlier paintings better, the most recent being done completely in oil and on a more chromatic colour scale (i.e. tones of pink or yellow). These newer works feel so different and less lively so don’t really captivate my attention in the same way as the earlier pieces. Similarly the more representational her paintings get the less I feel drawn in. A nest, a head, a figure; whilst still abstract the more recognisable they are, the more clumsy they feel, and less sculptural in my opinion because they become less about the paint and more about the image. There is something familiarly 'Francis Bacon-like' in the layering of paint and composition of space in the newer paintings but I’m not quite sure if they feel finished or like a step in the beginning of a new direction? They are all, however, works of an artist who is exploratory, thinking and adapting so it will be interesting to see where using oils takes Woods next.

 

'Untitled Diptych Part I' (2002)

At Hestercombe Clare Woods’ paintings feel more ambitious and more confrontational in their ‘wildness’ in contrast to the softer, well kept formal gardens behind the house, but in keeping with the grandness of John Bampfylde’s landscaping elsewhere. There is a lot to see and mostly it works really well except for the oil paintings on the stairs which I’ve already expressed that I'm not keen on anyway (but may be too far away to be seen) and one piece that fights with slightly awkward lighting and a purple ceiling. I think much has to be said as well for the windows of the gallery which at each exhibition have adopted their own matching detail; in this show appropriately in the form of a long red paint streak. Above all however I stress as I observed in 2006, the importance of seeing these works in person, as reproductions in photos does not quite do them justice. Like the Tania Kovats exhibition last year at Hestercombe and Michael Simpson at Spike, it should not be taken lightly how fortunate and important it is that the South West has access to these relevant, contemporary and inspiring shows and two of them being from painters! I think Clare Woods’ exhibition at Hestercombe rises to this without question.

 

Clare Woods ‘Clean Heart’ is on at Hestercombe Gallery until 30^th October 2016: http://www.hestercombe.com/event/clean-heart-a-landscape-retrospective-by-clare-woods/

 

IMAGES from: http://www.hestercombe.com/event/clean-heart-a-landscape-retrospective-by-clare-woods/

http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/johnmoores/recent-exhibitions/24/graphics/large/clare_woods.jpg

QUOTE from:* http://www.clare-woods.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/The-Difference-a-Day-Makes-Interview-with-Clare-Woods-by-Jackie-Haliday-.pdf

More Blood and Bone for Richer Terrain

In a new exhibition that opened last week at Hestercombe Gallery, ‘Terrain: Land into Art’ aims to do for earth what Tania Kovats’ previously did for water in an exhibition almost a year before at the Taunton-based contemporary art gallery. What is terrain? Where does Terrain begin and end? What is our relationship within it? And how can it be explored and depicted as art, are some of the questions ‘Terrain’ addresses at Hestercombe Gallery, which has appropriately always hosted a land, garden, or earth-based theme to nearly all the shows in response to the grounds and context the art is situ in. Quoting Tim Martin, curator of the gallery and exhibition,

 

“...It has become apparent that where landscape meets art and art meets landscape is central to our overall vision for Hestercombe.”

 

Kathy Prendergast 'Land' (1990)

The show opens downstairs with Kathy Pendergast’s, ‘Land’ (1990) [pictured above] where a mountain-tent-map hybrid is erected like a tent, but instead of canvas whose surface becomes part map, part mountain-range complete with rivers. The idea of the human element of discovey, exploration and mapping is fused with a visual depiction of the landscape in which it takes place.

 

 As the title of the exhibition suggests, ‘Terrain’ conjures associations with military, surveying or geological approaches to mapping and understanding a site or area of land. And the exhibition broadly speaking feels more pragmatic or scientific in its approach; it has work from artists such as Hamish Fulton, whose word-based pieces based on a three week walk, have come from a human experience in the land but are presented as an experience which has already taken place, then been digested by the artist and processed into the resulting art work. It seems like what generally comes out at the end of this assimilation is remarkably detached, a lot cleaner, more considered, conceptual and analysed than that of the actual experience of being in the landscape. Does the art in this exhibition offer anything new in how we experience the landscape? Yes, but some of it does so better than others.

 

Simon Faithfull '30km' (2003)

Such is the nature of this exhibition which focuses more on those human reminisces of lived experience in the land than works which feel as though they are in the moment. They are traces and you have to really be prepared to imagine and be actively bothered about picturing the likes of Roger Ackling burning lines into card with a magnifying glass in the piece, ‘In Five Hour Cloud Drawing’ (1980) so as not to dismiss it as a bunch of lines on card.  Visually starved it is instead the process, and the lived-moment of creating the work, which is in my view a lot more interesting than the result.

There are of course exceptions, with Rachel Lowe’s ‘A Letter to an Unknown Person No 5’ (1998) is a film piece that records a car journey in which the artist’s hand desperately struggles to capture the moving landscape by drawing on the window with a pen. It is frenetic and humorous and very quickly becomes abstract, Futurist-like, this work touches that most of our experience of terrain is spent moving through it.  Similarly, Simon Faithfull’s ‘30km’ (2003) film projected onto a circle on the floor documents the launch of a weather balloon attached to a camera as it spirals upwards giving a dizzyingly aerial perspective of the land that cuts-out intermittently providing a camera's eye view rather than that of a human perspective. Tim Knowles’ work, ‘Mungo Bush Walk’ (2013) also offers an alternative eye, with a pinhole camera taking images of Australian outback as the artist travelled. It creates an alien-like landscape caught in a mirage haze from the heat of the sun, its brightness likely partly responsible for the out of focus quality of the image.

 

Tim Knowles 'Mungo Bush Walk' (2013)

Even where artists are working directly from materials within the landscape, the work becomes semi-detached from it through having that human interaction. Richard Long uses mud. Raphael Hefti burns moss spores on photographic paper creating a scientific, moon-like image. Art tends to claustrophobe landscape, frame it, contain it and put it in commutable little boxes so it is interesting when artists like Hefti take a small part of it that when altered opens it out to create an image that alludes to space, the cosmos and something much bigger than the spores it came from.

 

More inclined toward romantic and aesthetic connections with landscape, by the end of the exhibition I was craving to go squelch around the garden in welly boots, romp across a field through the long grass or run up a big hill and take-in a deep breath of fresh air. None of the work in Terrain is obvious; Peter Doig being one of the few who offer what will be to many a more, familiar approach to capturing and expressing the mood of a particular place, through paint in ‘Red Deer’ (1990). [Coincidently not my favourite Doig, so a little disappointing as he is a stunning painter.] Along with Gillian Carnegie, ‘Mono’ (2005) whose dark thickly painted flowers sit in a status between decay and mourning and works well alongside Anya Gallaccio’s decaying flower heads behind glass also in the exhibition.

 

Gillian Carnegie 'Mono' (2005)

In being more challenging the exhibition, like the nature of terrain itself, proliferates possibilities and opens up a dialogue into inventive and imaginative interactions between people and terrain. It aims to look ,“...more to the ground, where bodies and land meet,” but I would have liked it to go a bit deeper. I felt it a little too detached from its subject matter, Terrain is a concept, something outside and inside is the gallery where we come to terms and process what it all means. The Dutch artist, herman de vries (not in this exhibition) still being for me, one of the best artists for capturing a sense of a very human reality of bringing the land into the gallery in a way that still feels quite scientific but from a genuine compulsion and fascination to bring the outside, in. I would like to have seen a bit more angst a bit more warmth, expression than cold pragmatism which isn't in all the work but overall dominates the show. Essentially an interesting show but with a little more fish blood and bone, a little more guts, earth and muck and this exhibition could have really grown into something beautiful, unknown or wild!

 

‘Terrain: Land into Art’ is on until 4^th July 2016 at Hestercombe

http://www.hestercombe.com/event/hestercombe-gallery-exhibition-terrain-land-into-art/

Image sourced from: http://www.artscouncilcollection.org.uk

The Pineapple of my Blogging Career!

In the age of the email it is sometimes all too easy to forget the simple pleasures of sending or receiving a postcard in the mail. The ‘Wish you Were Here’ exhibition of over 200 artists’ postcards including Carl Andre, Richard Long, Dieter Roth, Bruce Nauman, Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono, Ben Vautier, Gilbert & George, Susan Hiller, Gavin Turk, Ruth Proctor, Aleksandra Mir, Julie Cockburn and Mark Wallinger amongst many others collected by Jeremy Cooper should inspire even the most prolific instagramer that the humble postcard isn’t dead yet!

 

 

 A poll from 2012 revealed that only a mere

16% of British Holiday makers abroad sent postcards back home  in favour of social media.

Should we be concerned?  I presume environmentally speaking there is less carbon footprint to the electricity and power gone into sending an email than the air miles and transport required to send a postcard?(...It’s an interesting thought that I wouldn’t hazard guess how much it may influence people’s means of communication) Whilst not at the heart of its intentions,  ‘Wish you were here’ at Hestercombe in addition to presenting a showcase of artists’ postcards throughout history may also convince you that there is indeed still a place for both; that there is a skill and an art to postcards that supersedes digital modes of communication.

 

Peter Kennard & Cat Phillips 'Study of a Head XI' 2013

Despite my own interests in writing online I actually still do and enjoy sending postcards to unsuspecting friends as well as receiving them too. I even create my own to send! I think artists and designers have naturally continued and somewhat bias of me to say, but also naturally enjoy the creative challenge of either designing a card or writing on one. A traditionally A5 sized canvas of card or paper to work with, and even less room if one factors out the space for the address and stamp.

Is it possible to convey big ideas, thoughts and messages in such a limited space? You bet it is!

 Their less instantaneousness and time and thought that goes into their creation are in themselves skills that are worthwhile not neglecting. A postcard as Art offers fantastic parameters to make work, to be inventive and communicate. As such they continue to be used and inspire generations of artists today.

 

Such is the breadth of Cooper’s collection, some 200 of which are presented at Hestercombe Gallery as there is so much variety. As a whole it reads as a ‘Who’s Who’ of the art world, an anthropological archive of art history  from Robert Rauschenberg’s postcard featuring artist’s signature on a square of cardboard box, Susan Hiller’s ‘rough sea’ series of postcards of stormy British coastal scenes, Andy Warhol, Rachel Whiteread and Steve Butcher’s collage (pictured below right) mash-up of Piero Della Francesca’s ‘Duke and Dutchess of Urbino. Surely too many for one man to own alone so why not share them with an audience of many in what has been a nationally touring exhibition and book. There are cards here which are satirical, political, painterly, conceptual, minimal, jigsaw and place postcards. Postcards made of lead, toast, glass, with spoon and card crossing the whole art spectrum of media. It is a lot to see and take in! The show as a whole has a lot more to offer than pleasing nostalgia and though small contain some powerful art works that offer insight into broader ideas within a given artist’s practice.

 

Steve Butcher 'Wedding Portrait' 1989

I enjoyed some of the more word-based postcards in the exhibition, such as Graphic Artist Sarah Maxey’s ‘I’m at the Pineapple of my Career’ and many of the political cards such as 'Study for a Head XI' by Pat Kennard and Cat Phillips (pictured above right). Commercially speaking artists' postcards are a great art form to collect as they reproduce well in printed form and are easily portable. My only criticism is that it was hard to see some of the wall mounted framed postcards closely due to a double-hang and that’s not a reflection so much on my own height but the sheer number of postcards in the exhibition. The overall affect however is a joy because due to their familiar format they are artworks in which people can closely relate to. The scale and one-liner nature of many of them also make some of the ideas more graspable, the format is almost within most people’s means to have a go at creating themselves if so desired. I think it has the power to inspire a lot of people and generate an insight into artist’s ideas/practices. Incidentally, I am yet to find an artist who hasn’t at some point created an artist’s postcard so this is a collection that is set to continue growing! 



Currently not in Jeremy Cooper's collection, postcards from 'Routes, River, Rail' public art project in
 Taunton from 2010 in which I invited people to alter postcards of Taunton with what 'they would like to see'.
 (Pictured Tim Martin 'Where's the River?' 2010)

 

‘Wish you were here’ is on at Hestercombe House Gallery until February 28^th 2016

http://www.hestercombe.com/whats-on/events-and-activities/239-exhibition-wish-you-were-here/event_details