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.

This week I had the real pleasure of meeting up with Emily Jane Campbell artejcampbell.co.uk, and Lucy Gresley lucygresley.com in Oxford to discuss plans for putting some more power into the e-communications strategy for Plastic Propaganda. We had a working document which we are developing to make something sustainable and effective. At this stage there are probably as many questions as answers, which made the post lunch trip to Moma particularly relevant: We are walking a labyrinth (Richard Long, Walking a Labyrinth); e-possibilities endless, choices need to be made to get us where we want to go in the most efficient but not necessarily most obvious way.

The hang of the Abramovic works begs the question: What is the role of interactive work when it moves into private ownership and as a result ceases to be interactive? This and was echoed in our discussions about potential conflicts between commercial and non commercial aims, and also a general discussion of ownership and authorship.

But what I did love about the Long mizmaze and the Abramovic is the feeling that they are with you as you step on the footprints of the maker (even if no longer allowed).  I guess with the policy that is also what we have to remember, we are not reinventing the wheel, we can tread a well worn path, touch what people have touched before.

I went to see Abstract Expressionism at the Royal Academy, and while a little disappointed by the minimal showing of work by women, which is in fact discussed in their own catalogue…… so they knew, they knew.(D Anfam*) I spent a fantastic time in the Rothko room, which contains several of his vibrantly colourful works: Really luminous, beautiful and absorbing, and not over crowded on the day I went.

I find the relationship of these works with the Mural projects when America was launching itself as the centre of the art world by public funding fascinating, something not so heralded here but, remembering form A level and according to Gombrich central to the scale of works achieved. Many of the artists were able to move into the scale of work they worked with because of this early funding. And these works contain especially in the later stages such melancholy and turmoil, a post war phenomenon strong on New York culture of the time. The later works perhaps, express above all impotence in the face of death. It would have been interesting to have had more of the women’s work, as their process in a generalised way appears to age differently. And perhaps this does reflect the times, older women freer of domestic demands reaching out into the world. Older men world weary reaching in?? The trajectory of the men’s work (at east those who did age) seems to be external to internal, and the women’s the reverse. I will certainly be back..This is a really big show in every sense and needs a number of visits. Getting to see it when it wasn’t too busy made me feel like spending that money on membership was worth it. I sound like a hair care ad….
So I am meant to be doing admin for the rest of this week . I need to do some publicity for my work at Parallax and tidy up the front page of my website, in particular I need to arrange the early works from the Art from London Markets Project into a separate page. But after a really tough domestic day, yesterday finished off with a good night out with the fantastic Dani Tagen going to Yinka Shonabare’s PV and the pub. I guess prompted by the religious iconography in Shonabare’s 2D work here, we ended up discovering and discussing our shared heritage of Catholic school which was remarkably similar despite growing up in different continents. I sit at the keyboard now with indigo stained fingers. So here is the start of a new indigo work…

Now back to that admin…

Abstract Expressionism, edited D Anfam, Royal Academy of Art 2016 London
The Story of Art E Gombrich Phaidon Uk

 

This week I have been fiddling about with media,

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thinking about the lost girl series, experimenting, and attempting to complete Fulham Leith. The darker evenings, and the greater contrast in light between night and day makes me realise that these paintings may get lost in a room that is not well lit.
Full daylight image indoors vs full sun

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Decreasing light seems to me to be a very useful metaphor as dementia progresses and the person’s ability to communicate gets further challenged. The struggle to communicate so that all they are able to talk about is the most here and now of their experience.

So right now her experience is dominated by physical pain and activities which are beyond her ability to process because they require more light than she has. And she is not able to settle with this limit. Not satisfied, she wants distraction and finds it easy to blame everyone else for her restlessness, so it is easy for a gloomy depression to descend, and difficult for carers to lift that depression, or to resist it.

I find myself feeling rebellious and contentious faced with this slow fading of the light.

complete Fulham Leith
This piece contemplates the collective stories which have been washed away, unmarked or unremembered in a city like London, with a great river running through it.

In a way this creates more determination to record Padma’s shadowy stories, and also contrarily a wish to simply be able to accept, let it be washed away.

So I am starting a piece reaching towards that velvety darkness of the Lot Valley. Soft in the heat of the air, a darkness almost but not totally complete, and yet comfortable, beautiful absorbing. A level of darkness quite simply not available in London or any other town or city where the orange glow of street lamps interferes: Only found in rural remoteness or at sea. Happily my new canvases have arrived. In addition to this I have a love apple painting, based in the tomatoes that were growing in the greenhouse at Fulham Palace in mind, coppery, well lit, bright. And shaped in a way that gives testiment to their old name. A peculiar duality going on in my work and my life.

The dominoes skittling down the streets that burnt in the Fire of London coincided with the last day of Sugar and Spice. I sat with artist Susan Eyre whose partner was involved in the setting them up. We were invigilating on the last day of SS and we talked about her fascination with dark matter and the fall out from the referendum. It was really interesting and I’d love to hear more about her collaboration with research scientists, and hopefully see some of the work that gets produced.

A more ancient example of the overlap between art and science can be seen at the Science Museum, where in a rather small space they have packed an information dense exhibition about Leonardo and his designs. Dont miss the timeline at the start which places this work in its historical context. This complements very well the more comprehensive exhibition in Amboise near Tours which was where Leonardo spent his last few years. If you can’t get to Amboise I recommend you rush to the Science museum before this exhibition closes on Sunday…be quick.

Last weekend a huge fire burnt on the barge in the Thames, and all this week Radio 4 has been playing Samuel Pepys. A memorial for the fire of London. A reminder of another time when Britain suffered great divisions in society. The lovely thing about the project run by Artichoke arts within this context, was that it was all about collaboration and social bonding. An idea so pertinent to this time. Can this be a phoenix moment? At least this fire was not deadly, it was beautiful. And a part of me found it moving in a melancholic kind of way. Collaboration on the production of something beautiful and still beautiful as it all went up in flames, ephemeral.

Phoenix egg

So Sugar and Spice is over and all taken down, some of the work has another destination which has been confirmed but delayed, so is now blocking up my living room, over crowding it, I’m going to have to find it a better temporary home. My work in Sugar and Spice documented the way in which the legal abolition of slavery in Britain was a growing likelihood at the time of the building of the Telford design in St Katharine Docks. It asked several questions – about people as commodities, about whether the design was influenced by the growing likelihood of abolition, about whether the design was a negative response to more organised labour- simply a way of saving money, or inspired by better ideas about what it means to be human?

I have just been watcing BBC 3’s “Making a Slave” on i-player. 13000 or more people are living in slavery in Britain now and this programme gives a glimpse into the way in which people are kept under control, so that you don’t need to ask the question how could that happen now, here. It illustrates how. People are still treated as commodities in some farms factories and building sites across the country. Every now and again this makes the news:- When an enormous tragedy like the cockle pickers happens. But for 13000 it is an enormous tradgedy every day, and these numbers are believed to be an underestimate by some experts.

SO here it is, slavery may be illegal, and some people at least do escape, but it is happening here and now. The programme is based around the testimony of an ex-slave, a modern day Olaudah Equiano, who had his true identity disguised, presumably out of fear of recriminations.

By comparison 13000 is just under the population of Ringwood, the next town to Fordingbridge where I grew up. It is more than twice the population of Fordingbridge, my home town. If a whole small UK rural town had been taken over by gangmasters think of the scandal, the newspaper coverage, the 10 o’clock news…and yet that is effectively what has happened, it is just hidden, more dispersed, and the people affected are mostly new to Britain. The Somerset case was in 1772, which set legal precident, found that no one could be held a slave here. And it was the also true then that the person about whom the ruling was made was not born here, he was in fact trafficked. It is not that the legislation does not exist, it is that we are not implementing it properly as a society.

When the food or clothes you buy seem impossibly cheap, or the quote for the build excessively low we should think again. When the manufactured product says Made in Britain, that is not a guarantee that the people making it have been treated fairly and paid at least minimum wage. When we are encouraged to further “free up” the work force from the “strictures” of regulation, think 1984 doublespeak. Casual labour practices and hiring by the day are the gangmasters bread and butter.

What is clear is that our systems are failing. 13000 is alot of people.

So to finish up the holidays we took a trip to the The Summer Pavilion at The Serpentine. Even on a hot day it feels somehow like entering a glacier. The curve created with the geometrical shapes quite astounding. The day we visited was hot, and yet still this resonance. I love the way the cubes created windows through which to view the children playing in the park outside. Another thing to catch before summer finally disappears and the real ice comes.