Art From London Markets, a-n feature

The indigo works that I am showing at Chelsea come from a series addressing the question of sense making with diminished information. Indigo has been at the heart of global trade since it began, it is mentioned in Pliny, as a medicine, it originated in India but was grown as far east as China and as far west as West Africa since before the development of large scale mass sea trade.

Resistance
Indigo was traded by the East India Company in the Early days, with the Mogul Empire with Surat Indigo viewed as the best. Later it was also entrenched in the worst attrocities of the EIC in Bangladesh, being at the heart of the indigo rebellion which was key in the independence movement where farmers who had been forced to grow it as indentured labour rebelled and refused. In addition it was tied up in the Slave trade, and in particular in plantation slavery in the Carolinas (hense blue jeans). Trade in indigo was also a fairly early cassualty to the Industrial revolution when German chemists made an artificial replacement. Natural indigo has been revived in recent times as a “fair trade ” product.

Clouds over the Lethe

Mist over the Lethe
The Lethe is an icon of memories, the myth revolves around scaring across the surface in the final journey. However when there is no boat it is possible for the journey to take longer, for the traveller to be distracted in eddies, mists, rain and clouds, to wallow in particular spaces to loose perspective.
So here is the thing, intertwined within these images are ideas of people who never had their stories told, and an individual, one of the last of the people alive during the Colonial period whose memory is failing.

What are the Lost stories of Oblivion and Remembrance?

And at the centre of all of this is the struggle for reaching for a kind of truth from impaired reason and memory or incomplete narrative. What is that truth? Can it be called a truth at all? Which I suppose is an endless question for historians, and a central question for us all.
Whether you are robbed of reason or not if you can’t create a cohesive narrative is it possible to create a space that allows you to feel some kind of truth, some kind of real relationship with the material world? I am striving for the potent symbols and the appropriate space. And in examining what it means to try to make sense of anything, let alone a whole life or complex history of an Empire, there also needs to be the space to feel and breathe it, and in the end what I hope for these paintings is that they hold the essence of the question and the space to pose it.
I will be showing these works at the Parallax Art Fair at the weekend. If you would like tickets please go tohttp://www. parallaxaf.co/tickets.html and if you received an invitation to the Private View remeber to reply on Weds 19th.