Art From London Markets, a-n feature

This has been a busy week, getting the work ready  and nerves steady and down to St Katherine’s dock for the Nautical Perspectives Plastic Propaganda show. Exhibition on now!

Then getting on with some new work playing with indigo, juggling kids and a four day weekend…. Indigo which whether in powder or block form gets every where, but has a profound beauty when concentrated, giving me an unexpected joyful edge while making my mood indigo pieces. And yet the trade in indigo is so closely tied to the trade in spice and sugar and in turn with the slave trade…. all of which are on the route of / at the root of international sea trade established by the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and British traders.

Dotted through this blog are little selections from my experiments and works.  The changing colours and tones are remarkable from this one pigment which are all from one reliable source in   India.

The concentration I need to make the work I want to make feels a little dissipated by the other things going on, and on Tuesday I have to take care of Padma.  And yet at the moment I think and dream about indigo.  The stories that surround it and the actual medium itself, so dense and beautiful at one end of the spectrum, and light and suggestive at the other.

And the stories surrounding indigo are complex and illusive.  Romantic on the one hand, associated with wealthy women traders in West Africa, and then tied up intimately with spice, sugar and slavery on the other.  With trail blazing monopolistic Hapsburg Kings and privately owned National Monopoly Companies in Holland and Britain’s (East India Companies):  With the American War of independence: With the relationship between traders, pirates and the Kings and Queens of the continent of Europe. And also so suggestive of loss.  Loss of life, loss of power, loss of one trading system for another, one political system over another, trade as agreement or trade as a product of violence, loss of memory, loss of place,

and over time loss of value.  As one of the earliest most valuable imported goods in some way the stories of indigo are the stories of the development of that trade, complex and morally fraught as it is.