All Wright!

Reading Arnolfini CEO, Kate Brindley’s introduction to Daphne Wright’s solo exhibition, ‘Emotional Archaeology’ left me slightly surprised at the number of influences Wright’s work uses, “...the suburban and the domestic realm, also drawing upon references from art history, literature and film, to nonsense poetry and country and western music...” Brindley continues her intro in stating that through these references Wright, “offers us ways to think about difficult, often side-lined issues relating to class, aspiration, faith, parenthood, aging and care.” That’s a lot to process and leaves the sceptic in me wondering how many of these ideas Wright actually intended to be present in her work and how much of the aforementioned was Kate Brindley possibly over-outlining the ways of interpreting it? [Though it is important to note that this exhibition is in two halves, at Arnolfini and a National Trust property, Tyntesfield in North Somerset; this post focusing solely on the Arnolfini work]. Either way it points to the occupation for much of contemporary art as being ‘all encompassing’ or dealing with a wide range of ideas such as 'contemporary culture', whatever that is exactly? Whether it does this to make itself more accessible to audiences or give it an authority that ‘the establishment’ feels art needs in order to be credible or taken seriously I am unsure. What I will say however is that in writing about art I often worry about over analysing it as sometimes you miss the overall message; there’s a skill in being able to pick out themes in an artwork and another in being able to succinctly capture what it is about in only a few words. I’m still practising at both! In my stubbornness, I wanted to challenge that introduction a little and make my own conclusions about Daphne Wright’s work; so upon walking into the first room of the exhibition at Arnolfini and being confronted with an upturned, life-size flayed sculpture of a horse, a swan and monkey each in similar states of distress, one way or another, I was about to find out!

 

Stallion (2009) Marble dust and Resin.

From the beginning, the works in this exhibition clearly present themselves as being made by a highly skilled and competent sculptor interested in the nature of materials; this is an exhibition by an artist that, without wanting to dumb it down too much, ‘likes making’ (in other works upstairs it almost comes across as a kind-of 'thinking through the process of making'). The sculpture ‘Stallion’ in the first room; a life-size horse exquisitely cast from resin and covered in marble dust to give the effect of being entirely sculpted from marble whilst also mimicking a museum copied process. The whiteness of the marble against the theatrical red painted walls of the gallery creates for dramatic effect in what is the first of a series of contrasts throughout the exhibition used to create tension, anxiety or unease. The first piece that strikes you is the horse; it is an unusual perspective to see a horse from, yes it is distressing but in that infamous Andy Warhol, ‘car crash’ voyeuristic kind-of way it is also very interesting; even more so in context to its neighbours the hanging lamb, sickly monkey and flailing swan.

Lamb (2006) Marble dust, resin.

It is emotive, possibly all the more so for the animals various states being suspended in time, almost as if to prolong or scrutinise their situation. They play upon our understanding of myths; the powerful, heroic horse now fallen; the swan referring to the fallen young male in the Greek myth, Leda and the Swan’. Whether I would have picked-up on these specific references or not I did make the association between the portrayals of the animals as though museum sculpture in contrast to those ideals being presented in a much darker reality. The material and craftsmanship ignites a curiosity into the work before being repulsed or affected by the 'tragedy' of their situation.

 

That first room is where the animal theme begins and ends. Upstairs is a stylistically similar treatment of materials and shares with it a sense of conflict but is completely unexpected in content. A pot-plant made from unfired clay limply droops on the stairs to the upper gallery its sorry state reminiscent of a guilty truth of many whom will relate to the familiarity a neglected houseplant. The plant’s domesticity being more familiar than that of the horse, and in my opinion, more poignant in capturing the fragility between life and death. It is far more subtle. ‘Could this be what Wright’s work is about?’ I ask myself; ‘A reaction or set of emotive responses to these objects and their unusual materials?’ If so then the viewer’s conscious is pricked, pardon the pun, further in works such as ‘Where Do Broken Hearts Go?’ cacti made from tinfoil, into a sparse aluminium sci-fi desert complete with Country and Western songs. It is kind of tragic in its falseness and sense of melodrama. In a separate room Wright casts her two sons in jesmonite, they sit coldly and serenely on a family kitchen table in a part of the exhibition dedicated to children and child rearing. Here is also an unfired piece titled, ‘Clay Heads’ comprised of several free-standing naive faces with slits for eyes, their features unfinished or childlike again in attempt to use the material as a metaphor of both the malleable as well as fragility or vulnerability of childhood identity. If taken as a room unto itself it is quite interesting and you could draw a lot upon conversations of time, childhood and growing-up but for me personally, it is an idea touched upon in art and clay before (think Antony Gormley).

 

Still Life Plant (2014) Unfired clay.*

One of the most successful pieces in the exhibition for me, is ‘Domestic Shrubbery’ and takes the form of decorative Victorian plaster flowers, fauna and twisting branches that fill a room, floor to ceiling on every wall. Imagine a 3D version of William Morris wallpaper! What was once dismissively decorative now takes on a more constricting and sinister reality becoming an ensnaring cage of artificial nature than twee, idyllic country pattern. In some ways it is still quite beautiful from a craftsmanship point-of-view but I think the way that Wright subverts the domesticity and symbolism of nature used in that Victorian decoration and draws upon the wildness and threatening nature of those patterns into something that is altogether more confrontational. This was something designed to cause unease and if further proof was needed then hidden amongst the crisscrossing fronds is tiny shrivelled hearts accompanied by an eerie soundtrack of a woman’s voice making cuckoo calls. The heart’s make it a bit cliché and aren’t really needed but the presence of the cuckoo call is a reminder of the ‘cuckoo in the nest’ and the bird’s nature of laying its eggs in the nests of other birds. The viewer here is the outsider, the intruder in the nest both seduced by the inherent skill and beauty of the fragile casted decor and trapped by it at the same time.  It is the sort of work and space that changes your behaviour whilst you’re in it; a mixture of carefulness and curiosity. For these reasons it is one of the few pieces that best fits the following description, I read online about her work; “Wright’s art is the result of a relentless curiosity into the way in which a range of materials can create an involvement with often unspoken human preoccupations.”

 

Domestic Shrubbery (2009) Plaster, sand and spoken word.

After seeing the exhibition it raises an important issue for me with Wright’s work, in that it is hard to pin down to a single set of ideas or theme and instead of having one clear message it has several. People will go away remembering pieces from ‘Emotional Archaeology’, the horse, the lamb, the wallpaper, the monkey, but the link between the, ‘what was this all about?’ was more woolly when viewing the exhibition as a whole. Neither is there a huge amount of information about the artist to provide clues so you are left only with the work on display. Content-wise it is quite fragmented to piece together though an attempt to link the work comes through in the concept of archaeology derived in the exhibition title. If archaeology is taken to mean ‘the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture’ then the exhibition does take material culture of the home and references to childhood or Westerns in pop-culture and analyses how these themes can be reconstructed in tinfoil, clay or film and during that process new ideas are discovered that subvert our original understanding of that culture. Though more considerable effort and imagination is required to link pieces such a ‘Swan’ and ‘Primate’ to an ideas of the museum, myths and archaeological practices. I do not want to get too hung up on exhibition titles but in this case I was looking to the title for more guidance as to what Daphne Wright’s work was all about, it almost felt like it was trying to say too much and was possibly in danger of saying nothing at all. The exhibition's curator, Josephine Lanyon likens Wright's process of making work to that of emotional archaeology, "uncovers truths in the process of reproducing our contemporary culture." Whether those truths were about life, death, guilt, relationships, I am unsure? And I still do not know why you would necessarily go looking for anything truth seeking or meaningful in wallpaper without a reason I seem to be missing. If all of the above then the exhibition felt like a sweeping statement rather than a close look in depth at any one of those ‘truths’. It felt a little bit clichéd. Essentially there are many great parts in this exhibition but, perhaps like archaeology there are many gaps as there are answers, I’m just not sure about the whole.

 

Daphne Wright ‘Emotional Archaeology’ is on at The Arnolfini until December 31^st. http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/daphne-wright-emotional-archaeology



 

*Sourced from http://artaddict.net/events/article/2592/daphne-wright-frith-street-gallery

Can't You Hear It In The Silence?

Turris Davidica ora pro nobis –Tower of David Pray For Us No.2

I have had the pleasure of knowing Malcolm Plastow for almost nine years during which time I have only begun to learn more of the colourful and eventful life he has had within the arts in London, the States and Somerset (to name a few!). In a career spent dominated by the commitment to working within Arts Education, ‘Rejoicing Song and Falling Rain’ at The Old Brick Workshop in Wellington is Malcolm’s first solo exhibition in over ten years and reflects his sustained interests in music and passion for painting. The paintings on display are part of a three-year and ongoing series influenced by Early English Choir music. For me it poses the opportunity to form my own opinions as well as shedding some light on Malcolm's work to a wider audience.

 

It is significant to note, before I begin writing about Malcolm's paintings that we are from a considerably different generations; Malcolm, now ‘semi-retired’ from a lifetime spent in art education, myself almost thirty, bursting with popular culture references and experiences of art education more on the receiving end than delivering. This is relevant because for me, the first experience I had of one of Malcolm’s paintings was that some of them reminded me of a puzzle-based videogame app called Monument Valley.



Screenshot from ‘Monument Valley’ app

I likened the graphic-like geometry and flatness of paintings such as ‘Tower of David, Pray for Us’ (pictured) with its Arabic looking architecture to the cell-shaded, equally creative and almost ‘impossible’ architecture of a videogame. A videogame which, coincidently won a substantial amount of awards and is comparable to exploring a world created by M C Escher. I clearly respect that this was never Malcolm’s intention in the work, if anything their flatness is more alike to that of a Fresco to which it shares a narrative and both spiritual associations or Kandinsky for its shape/colour compositions. Irrespectively, the reason why I am writing this post is because I think that Malcolm's paintings, whilst grounded in an almost archetypal symbolism, are still open to interpretation and perhaps more importantly, relevant and contemporary for an audiences or people such as myself, today.

 

Et vitam venturi sæculi –And The Life Of The World To Come

The works exhibited in the exhibition ‘Rejoicing Song and Falling Rain’ are in reality, derived from works by 15^th and 16^th Century composers Peter Philips and John Taverner. There is something likeably 'alternative' and almost rebelliously admirable about Taverner, “whose compositions allowed him to work musically outside of the confines of a set text, including references to the geometry and the construction of the floor plans and other symbolic architectural features used in the construction of the great European cathedrals.” It seems that Taverner’s work was creative outside its medium of being purely music into something word and worldly-based making it much more holistic (catering to both mind and soul if you like). I can see some of this principle applied in Malcolm’s paintings, other than the obvious direct references to cathedral architecture the imagery in the work is not confined to the realms of a singular religious belief; there is imagery from the tower of David and crown of thorns associated with Christianity to numerology and chakras, the latter more associated with Buddhism. The work is more encompassing to an idea of the spiritual and the sacred; a non preachy narrative that speaks of nature, femininity, the human body, doorways/passages and the many mixed connotations these have....?!

Regina angelorum, ora pro nobis –Queen of Angels, Pray For Us

These manifest themselves as birds, plants, open doorways, windows, streams, mountains and contrasts of light and dark which bring everything into balance. Some of the paintings are far from even being spiritual they are almost otherworldly (pictured) If I am allowed to drop another cultural reference the piece titled ‘Queen Of Angels, Pray For Us’ reminds me of the surface of a colonised alien Mars or scene from Frank Herbert’s Dune. Whilst grounded in historical architecture, the environments they are situ in still allow for much to be left to the imagination.

The titling of the exhibition, ‘Rejoicing Song and Falling Rain’ reflects that idea of opposites as an essential part of what makes balance and present in many aspects of the paintings in the show. For example, meaning and image coexist in a seemingly effortless synchronicity, everything is there for a reason from the pecked wings of the pelican to the architecture of the temples [derived from the Tree of Life].  Despite this attention to detail, ‘reason’ isn’t everything and Malcolm’s paintings are also a celebration and expression of the medium of paint, colour and form on surface. They are warm, rich and uplifting in their use of colour.

 

Turris Davidica ora pro nobis –Tower of David Pray For Us

I have since listened to recordings of the pieces "Litania Duodecima" and “Missa Corona Spinia”. It is powerfully, emotive music not limited to its religious origins in being able to be appreciated or promote a reaction.  In fact if one were to take the terminology that makes up any piece of music such as, tempo, rhythm, layering, crescendo, silence and pause these terms and more could equally be interpreted into visual works of art [think composition, texture, tone to name a few]. In Malcolm’s paintings being influenced by music the connection to that terminology manifests itself in the symmetry and balance between shapes, textures and colour using structure, proportion and light. What they lack audibly to their counterpart they make up for in matching contrasts of silence and visual noise in the form of birds in flight or perceived ‘loudness’ felt in tones of colour. These elements come together in the paintings to create something of a reverence that may be read as spiritual and it is worth mentioning resonance, as a word that gets all too lightly overused into art criticism today, but is easily understood in context to this music that is timeless and provoking on a deep, almost visceral level; the paintings also reflect an element of that affect.

There is certainly something spiritual in their devotional-like repetition or ‘truth-seeking’ in their revisiting of certain themes such as the tower, the star and the tree of life.

The connection and success between the understanding of listening to the music and the feeling expressed in the paintings is highly subjective and for me not all the paintings achieve this, and are perhaps as much Malcolm’s interpretation of the music as my drawings/prints of tools are to me. They aren’t trying to match the music as offer an alternative way in to it; what you do take away from Malcolm’s paintings however is a an uplifting sense of orderliness,  and harmoniousness that is as universal as the language of music itself.
 

Malcolm Plastow –Rejoicing Song and Falling Rain can be seen from Monday 10th  – Sunday 23rd October 2016, Open daily (10am-4pm) at The Old Brick Workshop, Higher Poole, Wellington, Somerset. TA219HW.

For further information visit: http://www.Theoldbrickworkshop.com

Dust, Interrupted

It has been a while since I posted anything about tools on this blog [spanner in the workz] and in keeping with tradition I have decided to focus this week’s post on a painting seen recently at the John Moores Painting Prize in Liverpool. That and occasionally it is satisfying to write about one piece of work in more depth instead of attempting to write about it all!

 

Whilst primarily a British prize for painting the John Moores Painting Prize  for the past four years has included a partner exhibition, John Moores Painting Prize China and exhibited in Shanghai. The five winners from that prize are also exhibited alongside the British John Moores in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.
 

The question, ‘When is a painting not a painting?’ Would be a good place to start for discussing Lang Shuilong’s ‘Fundamental Tool’, created from dust on linen it already breaks convention in being the only ‘painting’ in this year’s John Moores Prize not to actually include any paint! I am unsure if my selecting this work as my favourite in the show reflects well on the state of the Painting Prize as a whole other than raising a trivial point that such categorisation has long been irrelevant and is generally a good thing and proves the Prize isn’t stuck somewhere in the past.
 

Lang Shuilong 'Fundamental Tool' (2015) Dust on Linen. 128 x168cm.

 In ‘Fundamental Tool’ the trace of  the shovel where Shuilong once laid it flat on the linen creates an almost indecipherable ghostly-void in the centre of this work; you are not sure at first glance that it may even be a tool, it almost looks completely abstract. The shovel’s absence is defined as an outline by the dust that has settled around it from the building-site where it was created. Shilong’s intervention is to then use a paintbrush to wipe the dust back off the linen canvas, “hoping that art will be able to undo nature, and creating a painting that sits between control and chance”. The whole piece is a very subtle and both traces of the artist’s brush and tool are the only structural elements to be seen.

Natalie Parsley 'Pin Hammer Drawing' (2012) Detail.

As someone who has spent a considerable amount of time in my own practice using tools the idea of ‘control vs chance’ is one that does not seem to go away. Tools generally, are often depicted as objects of control or power (think communist hammers and sickles) but often when you speak to people that use them on a regular basis the relationship between ‘man and tool’ is more sympathetic in that they extend our reach of what the human-body can do, but as much as we are in control of them, they in-turn control our actions as much as our body form defines their design and purpose. Just as ‘control’ is associated with tools in art therefore so is the human body that wields them; the scale of Shuilong’s painting is body-sized and was it not horizontal would imply that association of an upright human-figure even more. The fact that it is horizontal is a much more submissive state and so highlights the attention to the absence of a human figure  or a figure at rest which is why maybe at first it appears more abstract or alien.

 

Natalie Parsley 'Hammer Drawings' (2012) Charcoal on Paper.

My own journey from creating fairly large scale representational drawings of tools eventually evolved to using the tools themselves to create the drawing [this took the form of a hammer used to make marks on a surface either through mono-print or hitting a lump of carbon from the centre of a sheet of paper working outwards as it gradually broke into smaller fragments and eventually dust, to create a drawing]. The element of chance in this work, for whatever psychological reasons, was one I was never particularly yielding towards, but none-the-less it was unpreventable in that the drawing had to adapt to where the charcoal dust and fragments scattered and broke off. In ‘Fundamental Tool’ however this juxtaposition between control and chance signifies the opposing factors of man’s perceived sense of being in control against the unstoppable natural forces of dust and time. To elaborate further it is between man’s control over the tool, here as a means of shovelling cement to build a structure and the unpreventable and uncontrollable consequence of the dust that falls or is blown by the wind after time; time which is also inevitable but out of man’s control. In intervening with this process by using a paintbrush, Shuilong, in a part archaeologist, part artist statement is trying to regain back that control.

 

Man Ray 'Dust Breeding' (1920) Photo.

It is also an active version of Man Ray’s photo, ‘Dust Breeding’ [1920] that came into existence from Duchamp’s ‘Bride Stripped Bare of Her Bachelors, Even’ laid flat and purposefully left so that it developed a thick layer of dust. The hand of the artist within Shuilong’s painting is the crucial difference between the observed dust of Man Ray’s photo and the disturbed dust in ‘Fundamental Tool’ in which the pushed around dust is important at creating a narrative of an implied action that has taken place, the image being seen here is the consequence of the actions of the shovel having been used for its work is then placed down, the resulting dust created from its digging eventually settles around it leaving a trace. Man Ray’s dust was a result of time, waiting and doing nothing whereas Shuilong’s was as consequence of work or an action. In my own work I had the similar rationale to Shuilong, that whilst not physically present in the drawing, the tool was still present in the resulting marks that told of the action which had taken place. Whilst the end image was subject to chance the actions that led to its creation were most certainly more controlled.



Zhao Liang 'Behemoth' (2016) Film. Still.

For me, this painting was also reminiscent of a film documentary I had seen a few days before during my stay in Liverpool; the film, titled ‘Behemoth’ documented the infernal plight of the Chinese mining industry focusing in particular on the lives of the farmers turned miners who work there. It was mesmerising visually however also uncomfortable viewing, the sheer scale of what was happening and relentless futility of the miner’s situation a depressing reality to comprehend. It is hellish in every sense of the word. One of the lasting images from this film was the amount of coal dust, soot, and smoke, earth and stone that left its coating on everything and everyone; so much that it actually results in the deaths of many of those who are exposed to it for long periods of time. The tragic thing about this particularly is that many of these miners have very little other choice other than to embark in this dangerous line of work in order to exist. Understandably the film has caused some controversy in China and without wanting to make unfounded comparisons I could not help but see Shuilong’s ‘Fundamental Tool’ in relation to this documentary I’d seen the night before, even more relevantly with Shuilong of course being Chinese. We know nothing of the person who laid the shovel down in ‘Fundamental Tool’ but the ghostly impression the trace of it leaves only furthers the feeling of absence of its owner. I suppose I started to wonder if it was the shovel left by one of those coal miners in ‘Behemoth’, its owner also succumb to the dust and soot of its actions. I am amazed at just how bodily work without the human figure present in them can be and ‘Fundamental Tool’ is an excellent example of this. There is the bodily element of the shovel and its association with bodily use, its horizontal positioning on the canvas that echoes a lying-down position or even perhaps a figure being buried; the shovel at once the object of burial and the representing the deceased. There are the physical marks made with the brush of a human-hand and then there is the use of dust which is also synonymous with the earth, stars and the idea that in some ways we are all made of dust. It is pure coincidence that I saw these two things around the same time, it does not however change the fact that these things are happening in China and could still be relevant. Shuilong creates these pieces from construction sites around China noting how the tools from the past are still the tools used today. They both are looking at China's occupation with growth and the consequences that construction has.I prefer the possibilities being kept open and it is perhaps unfair to compare the two together but I was unable to separate the two at the time.

It is however this central importance, signified by the positioning of the tool in the centre of the painting that gives 'Fundamental Tool' its title and in my own art relationship with tools to date, I hope this post has gone some way to proving just how much there is to be thought about and continues to fascinate me from something as seemingly mundane as the tool. Still much digging to be done!
 

Lang Shuilong’s ‘Fundamental Tool’ can be seen as part of the John Moores Painting Prize at The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool until November 27th 2016 http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/johnmoores/

 



We Can Work It Out

With just over a month left to visit the Liverpool Biennial 2016, here’s the ‘Spanner in the Workz’ review of what to expect...

 

Now in its tenth year, the biannual contemporary arts festival, integrated across communities and venues in the city of Liverpool, has become a regular fixture on many an art calendar; least alone in part thanks to the added draw of some of the city’s more or less salubrious pubs and bars! Its inclusion of both national and international artists have made it, in some way, the cultural 'acid-test' of what to expect from contemporary artists working today; the most recent artistic practices, developments, thinking and reaction to some of the current developments and challenges faced in the art world at present.

 

Granby Street, Toxteth -Liverpool

It should come as no surprise that Liverpool, like most of the country, continues to struggle from cuts to arts funding over the last few years (despite this it is reassuring that the festival is still running), but is becoming increasingly reflective of the impacts that lack of funding may be causing. This year’s Biennial feels like a befuddled lack of continuity or criteria from direction of a clear theme or funds needed to bring in curators/artists with this sort of experience OR artists hungry for the exposure that participating in the Biennial would give. It has in fact been curated by committee into a series of episodes titled, Monuments from the Future, Flashbacks, Ancient Greece, Children’s Episodes, Software, and Chinatown. In short it feels more confused, less defiant and as though it has slightly lost its way in being clear in what message it wants to give; even the Student Protests from 1985, shown in a film and documentation in Open Eye Gallery do little to stir cause for action today or ignite social change. They’re of the past and only seek to act as a comparison at how un-politically motivated and disinterested my generation are often guilty of portraying. I am perhaps stubbornly of the belief that art can act as a platform for self-expression and still have a social or ethical cause or at the very least have some meaning or significance to the present (cinema, seems to do this better than most).

 

All of this is reflected in the choice of artists to display in the Tate Liverpool, classical Greek sculptures amongst Ikea-style furniture and random assorted half-hearted piles of rubbish on the floor (Half-hearted piles of rubbish, as they are too small to have significance and slightly too contrived to look natural). They are the, dare I say, ‘work’ of Jason Dodge who calls the intervention ‘what the living do’ but it sounds like trite to me and doesn’t say anything new about man’s relationship with his waste. I suppose the fact that it annoys me by its being in an art gallery is the point he’s trying to make though it still feels weak for being so subtle and failing to care whether it engages with its audience or not. This being the 2016 Biennial at its worst and many critics pointing out that viewers ‘have to sift through the rubbish’ in this year’s Biennial is an accurate assessment. Visually, Koenraad Deedibbeleer’s use of subtly altered Greek sculpture is interesting but only because they are Greek sculptures, the newly created modern plinths they stand on are somewhat superfluous and don’t really add anything new. If ‘pointlessness is the point’ and that it is in some way reflective of the throw-away, media heavy era we are currently occupying then it feels lazy and somehow unhelpful as it is unclear if it is being critical or supportive. Generally speaking I think I am leaning toward a contemporary art that challenges the status quo rather than adopting it. Upstairs and not part of the Biennial programme of events is the excellent Francis Bacon exhibition that only widens the cynical division between the art of the past and that of contemporary. Why couldn’t the contemporary exhibition have been the better of the two? I think art needs to rise to the challenge rather than take such an apathetic approach.

 

Rita McBride at Toxteth Reservoir (2016)

In almost all other arts, from music, to film and books there is a much greater desire placed in the making of these mediums to engage with their audiences, create excitement and progression of new ideas and intent behind their making than much of the contemporary art offerings on display here. There is a similar felling that filters into this year’s Bloomberg New Contemporaries, apathy breeds apathy, with work that is so ‘self-aware’ or trying to be too clever or self-referential of the art world within which it resides that it often fails to communicate with its audience. I don’t think any of this is reflective of contemporary art or graduate work as a whole; more frustrating that the work selected does not portray enough of the breadth well. Maybe it is a question of, “is this representative of the true direction that the art of today is heading?” or more relevantly “If the work shown in this year’s Biennial is representative of Contemporary Art today then is there still a place within contemporary art for an art that is meaningful?”

 

There are however a few glimmers of hope and in what the Liverpool Biennial has always prided itself in doing so well, is opening up unusual or abandoned spaces to artists and allowing the public access to some truly remarkable buildings. This year is no exception and the ABC Cinema, Cains Brewery and Toxteth Reservoir are a few of the gems worth investigating as buildings alone.

Next year the Cains Brewery is being transformed into artists studios! This is great news as its a spectacular space. Although the curation of the Biennial art show currently occupying Cains Brewery fails to compete with its surroundings or respond to the context it finds itself in. Visitors will be disappointed to find that there are no references to the buildings interesting history that beneath the brewery is a lake that is 40 feet deep; somewhat surprisingly given the mention of it in the Biennial guide (why mention it if none of the work responds to it?!) There is a video here by Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, ‘Dogsy Ma’ Bone’ that uses locations in the Brewery and throughout Liverpool but isn’t enough on its own to quell the disappointment of the exhibition as a whole. Outside, is an un-open- able door as part of Lu Pingyuan’s ‘Do not Open it Series’; a further confounding metaphor if needed that the future of art is perhaps a locked door to nowhere or nowhere other than our perception of what we believe is behind the door… 

 

Lu Pingyuan 'Do Not Open Series', Cains Brewery, Liverpool  

The greatest success of this year’s Biennial is the integration of the main festival with its inner city areas. In and around Toxteth there are little signs as to where the City’s European Capital of Culture funding in 2008 was spent and even fewer signs of people or life compared with that of the bustling shopping district of Liverpool One. Despite this however, the artists have moved in and are beginning to make positive changes; on Granby Street, Turner Prize winning Art Group, Assemble have been working since 2012 to save the area from demolition through collaboration with the community. Granby Workshop is a social enterprise based there which sees handmade products made and sold by the local people. Elsewhere on Rhiwlas Street, Lara Favaretto has placed a 'Momentary Monument- The Stone' in the middle of this abandoned terraced street that looks like something more out of a dystopian horror than England, 2016. After the Toxteth Riots in 1981 many people have been forced to move out of such areas to allow for redevelopment. A redevelopment however that appears to be a long time coming and as result has only led to further decay of much needed houses. Painfully depressing, yet stunningly too, the area is a remarkable ghost-town and is an important reality-check from the ‘pointlessness’ of much of the Biennial art in the centre. Favaetto’s stone stands like a sentient monolith in the middle of this street, part blockade, part gravestone, part Brutalist sculpture, its appeal is in its context. In its unmovable, stubbornness it signifies some of the resistance and confrontation matched by the people whose lives were affected by events that happened here. On one side it has a small postal slot for donations or notes when after the Biennial the stone will be removed and cracked open; its contents distributed to local asylum seeking charities. 

 

Lara Favaretto 'Momentary Monument -The Stone' (2016) Rhiwlas Street

Just three-hundred metres down the road from this is the impressive Toxteth Reservoir, no longer in use, its purpose in a modern-day Liverpool is yet to be defined. The building slopes upwards with a flat turf lined top and inside is a chamber of arches and steel columns befitting of an atmospheric scene from a thriller or crime drama. Stepping inside this space viewers encounter Rita McBride’s laser installation consisting of several straight green beams of light, crossing in places, spanning the length of the reservoir. The affect is one of the most visually striking spectacles in the entirety of the Biennial and transforms as well as illuminating the space into something both dramatic and unreal at the same time. The laser beams shimmer under the dampness of this cavernous-like space and the whole thing feels temperate, fragile and in-keeping with some of the uncertainty of what the future holds within this building and area. McBride describes it as a wormhole and its use of green light does give the whole atmosphere a sci-fi feel, but for me it’s the way it works within the architecture of the reservoir that makes it so exciting; the horizontal lines created by the beams in contrast the the verticals of the supporting columns and curves of the bricked archways compositionally makes a lot of very interesting shapes and shadows. This work was created for this space and it’s that level of understanding or site-specific awareness that is missing in so much of the Biennial elsewhere.  

 

Ian Cheng 'Something Thinking Of You', Hondo Chinese Supermarket, Liverpool

Back in the City centre you’ll find more video art than you could ever hope to see in one place, even along the shelves inside a Chinese Supermarket (pictured)! I could almost write a whole piece about the video art in this year’s Biennial alone. Mark Leckey ‘Dream English Kid’ shows a snapshot montage of the cultural events that happened in the artist’s year’s growing-up between 1964-1999. The film has some brilliant moments, amateur footage from an early Joy Division gig sourced from YouTube and close-up, panning shots of vinyl record sleeve that resonate of nostalgia that Leckey’s work tends to do usually quite well. This piece covers so many ideas that it almost ends up saying nothing at all, but perhaps in that way it is more representative in portraying the feeling of memory/memories as a series of glimpses and fragmented layers thrown-together? Which would be convenient for Leckey, but acts more like the work in the Tate and Bloomberg tending to alienate its audiences.

 

Krzysztof Wodiczko 'Guests' (2011) FACT, Liverpool

If you only go see one film however go see Polish artist, Krzysztof Wodiczko’s ‘Guests’ (2011) at FACT gallery on Wood Street. Projected as a series of life-size arched, illuminated doorways the silhouettes of legal and illegal immigrants in Poland and Italy who animate these doorways in scenes of everyday life in a public square; there is a window cleaner, leaf blower, umbrella seller, parents, children and others. Conversations and actions happen simultaneously with characters occupying and disappearing from their framed windows as passers-by. So watching this film is to read (its subtitled) fragments of conversations about immigration, debates about seeking asylum and the situation of immigration policies and the affects it has on real people and their lives. For projections they look like ghostly Marlene Dumas paintings and is one of the few immersive video installations in the Biennial. Each figure is anonymous so the viewer becomes devoid of any judgments they may bring to the piece; these characters are all simply people. Wodiczko’s other pieces in FACT are given smaller space but deal with some equally poignant issues from homelessness to PTSD amongst American war veterans and is certainly an artist to look out for.

 

Overall the Biennial may feel a bit muddled this year and generally it hasn’t been as good as it was in perhaps its heyday as the Capital of Culture year; though despite this people still keep visiting it and it deserves to thrive if nothing other than for the city and its people who have supported it for so long.

 

Liverpool Biennial 2016 is on until October 16^th. Visit: http://www.biennial.com/

Discoveries Aplenty but Geology Exhibition needs to Dig Deeper!

‘Marking Time: Geology 2’ at Watchet’s Contains Art may have ended but for those of you who missed it, this week’s post aims to unearth and discuss some of its exhibits...
 

Moments in Time display of research materials at Contains Art

 ‘Marking Time’ continues where it left off in 2015 as the, culmination of a 2-year creative development project in which six local artists [they are; Alison Jacobs, Melanie Deegan, Sue Lowe, Angie Wood, Lucy Lean and Andy Davey] have met regularly, ‘braving the mud and tides to explore the full extent of the beaches and coast around Watchet’...and learning more about the processes such as erosion and weathering that formed the coastline to inform and inspire their work. Looking at fossils, ‘fossil tourism’, geology, mapping and woollen manufacture the exhibition featured an array of practices from print-making, casting, painting and drawing to paper-folding, hand-spun yarn and more.

 

Alison Jacobs' ammonites made from Geography notes 

The strength of this exhibition was in fact that there were so many different components to look it. The shipping-container space that is Contains Art, became a walk-in cabinet of curiosities with not only the works produced by the artists on display, but arguably in some cases more interestingly, the books, sketches, maps, paraphernalia and fossils themselves collected as part of their research (pictured). I am a firm believer that the ‘research itself’ if done well enough can become the ‘art’ itself and unfortunately there aren’t enough occasions when one actually sees this exhibited in Somerset; I loved looking at the books, fossils, sketchbooks and curiosities displayed on shelves within this exhibition. It said a lot about the interest, passion and depths to which the group of artists had researched geology and the coastline of the surrounding area. In-turn the connection this research had to some of the individual artist’s responses was clear.

 

Andy Davey

 Angie Wood’s earthy paintings (literally, she uses the local earth she collects) have an authenticity of the weather and elements that shape and age much of the Watchet coastline. Melanie Deegan casts large ammonite fossils and sculpts rock formations out of corrugated-card. Andy Davey (pictured) maps the patterns found in the erosion and texture of coastal formations whilst Sue Lowe (pictured) creates collographs based geological layers and textures. Visually these works are engaging and interesting pieces but I feel the weakness in this exhibition is in that, where some pieces touch upon ideas of erosion, layering and excavation that comes with geology and formations of the coastline,

Sue Lowe

they do so in little depth and so in some ways feel more aesthetically pleasing or obvious rather than really exploring much deeper. Or in some ways they feel so personal to the artists who made them that it is hard for the viewer to get anything else from the work.  Some of the colours, ideas and processes that inform the work could have been developed further to create work that was either more site-specific or referenced ideas of geology, weathering and erosion found in other places.
 



Lucy Lean

Elsewhere this is more evident, Lucy Lean spins yarn using local rocks as spinning whorls, her work exploring the human-response to the ancient local trade. She is looking at the primordial nature of ancient processes and human connections with the materials found in a place. The pieces made from this yarn are tactile, totemic, of-the-hand; their yarn having symbolic connections to the passing/threads of time. It makes you think about the physical passing of time and I personally like that it is less direct making the viewer relate the concept of time to the human relationship to craft and the land. It’s enjoyably unexpected.
 

Alison Jacobs

My favourite pieces from this exhibition however being Alison Jacob’s ‘Face’ magazines (pictured) in which she has cut the pages in coastline-like waves to create coloured layers that recede mimicking the geological layers on a map. I like the way these works take a modern and existing object and apply a geological idea to it; the magazine and its cultural history being excavated as stone and soil is -all we see being fragments and glimpses of past histories rather than the 'full-picture'. It brings, like Lucy’s work, a human-element to it that makes it more relatable and suggests the passing of time. Here we have something that was once disposable now being considered as a typological object; it had me thinking of other places we can find other ‘geological’ processes such as layers in billboard, peeling wallpaper, weathered or buried surfaces etc. In another paper-based piece Alison has transformed her Geography degree notes into a sea of origami ammonites (pictured) that neatly line the top shelves of a museum-like display cabinet like precious specimens before spilling out into a disorganised heap on the floor. It’s a thoughtful transgression of our relationship to studying and the paper it accumulates from being highly valued to lining the floors of many a student bedroom. They make you smile and are surprisingly interesting each individually as well as making up the bigger whole.
 

‘Marking Time’ achieves much and does not disappoint in the breadth of treasures it contained; it is rewarding too, to see the research and passion of the participating artists displayed as part of the exhibition as a whole. How that research has then manifest itself in some of the work is perhaps where I am more critical, some of it feels a little obvious or would, ironically perhaps benefitted from more time in allowing the ideas in this work to develop. Even so there is much delight to take from the skill and visual and aesthetic appeal of all the work. For the serious fossil hunter (as with the art in this exhibition), finds found deeper in the earth, in the tricky places that may be hardest to reach are often greater as they are rare.

‘Marking Time-Geology 2’ has ended but visit http://www.containsart.co.uk/ for news of more ‘Contains Art’ exhibitions!
 

Hollow Talk

Pardon the pun but it is hard not to sound sappy when talking about KatiePaterson’s experientially and aesthetically pleasing art work, ‘Hollow’ installed in the grounds of Bristol University. Containing 10,000 tree species formed into a man-made hollow that is encased within a Douglas fir structure; the piece is described as, ‘a miniature forest of the world’s trees’. It’s a macro concept on a relatively micro, or bodily-sized scale. Visitors are invited to enter ‘Hollow’ and contemplate, see, touch and experience the colours, textures and smells of many species of trees, samples of which, we are informed, ‘connect across time and space.’ They certainly do come from all over the world and contain fossilised samples over 390 million years old. It is important that it is bodily sized (the piece comfortably fits 1 to 2 people at the same time) as it allows for a more grotto-like and intimate experience that forces its viewer to get-up-close within the work.

 

Inside 'Hollow'

The collection is impressive and it certainly is an immersive experience, but for all its initial wonder and difference, these romantic notions are in fact driven by something altogether more scientific. It crosses disciplines, Katie Paterson as an artist working in collaboration with students studying Biological Sciences at Bristol University and architects Zeller and Moye. This is refreshing and I think artists working with scientists and architects generally is a mutually beneficial relationship; here in ‘Hollow’ it becomes as much about archiving tree specimens, designing a ‘space’ and ‘creative responses to illustrate how trees influence our experience of the planet’. I'd previously seen a piece by Katie Paterson in 2014, titled 'A History of Darkness' in a fantastic exhibition 'Curiosity'* in Cornwall; this piece archived 'darkness' in the form of slides of the night sky. Here, Paterson applies that same treatment of uniformity and archiving to tree specimens. 

 

There is much to marvel, walking into ‘Hollow’ is to discover a cave-like stratum and experience a muted silence, softened light from holes in Hollow’s canopy and smell from the world outside. As a structure it is a quietening, almost cathedral-like space in terms of the reverence the surprise of stepping into it causes.  After this subsides however its lasting resonance or deeper connection with the trees and how they influence our experience of the planet feels somewhat lost. ‘Hollow’ works as a man-made museum or collection of tree species, the samples within it are mostly rectangular or square cuts but formed into something that is mimicking a natural form.

 

This makes it non-comparable to an actual lived-experience of being in a woodland glade and is therefore hard to relate a machine cut sample of fossilised tree to its history or once living relationship with its environment. We are told some of the trees it contains are of great significance, such as an Indian Banyan tree and a Japanese Gingko from Hiroshima which is a wonderful thought, but these samples have become so detached and altered into their now man-made forms that they become mere building blocks in a larger work. Some may look at this as humbling or a reference to a philosophical concept of all these remarkable trees being altogether a part of one bigger whole that is a statement on ecology and diversity. There is a DNA, building block-like element to ‘Hollow’ which certainly backs this idea up, however for me personally I feel it has less impact now that the characteristics of the original trees has been unified into a form that can be used for construction rather than building something that displayed their more individual and natural forms. Unlike, 'A History of Darkness' the significance and endeavour of collecting these samples is lost with the overall impetuous of the work becoming more about the 'space' and structure rather than the collecting or feat of having 10,000 tree samples -an opinion that I am sure will divide many. The idea of time and age within these samples is hard to gauge and as mentioned previously I struggled, once the initial wow-factor had subsided, to have any lasting thought on the significance or importance of trees from this work.

 



Outside view of Katie Paterson's 'Hollow' at Royal Fort Gardens, Bristol.

These are dead trees, harvested trees and so do not respond, as you’d expect, like living trees that sway and crack and creak in the breeze. It’s beautiful and disconcerting at the same time and made me ponder the question of whether it is possible to ‘preserve something that’s already dead’? Scientifically perhaps, yes you can, but I am less sure of ‘what’ is actually being preserved in ‘Hollow’ as these are samples of wood and not the seeds or living tree itself. Perhaps like most museum collections ‘the act of preservation’ is not in the artefacts themselves but in the educating through the artefacts that leads to and promotes preservation and ecology of living things. I speculate.

 

 I enjoyed this piece but feel it lacks permanence, to what I experienced as a more visual and immersive form of organising or sampling tree species rather than an environmental or human connecting to or relationship with/how trees influence our existence. Like being inside an entomology cabinet rather than looking at one, you could not appreciate the true scope of diversity and range of trees when transformed into one large structure.

 

‘Hollow’ is open at Royal Fort Gardens at Bristol University during daylight hours. For more info visit: http://www.hollow.org.uk

 

*http://spannerintheworkz.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/nosing-around-in-newlyn-and-penzance.html

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