I was very pleased to have an article published by Blouin Art Info which remarked I had not, in this blog addressed the reasons for the riots yet. http://uk.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/946374/painting-exhibition-on-the-2011-riots-opens-in-tottenham#comment-480784
I have written before about the sensations of fragility that the riots sparked not just in me personally but across the country, if not the world. I have written from a personal standpoint about the riots about what I saw and how it personally touched me. However I have also read extensively and understand the frustrations as to why people were moved to find a voice, despite the violence of that voice and the subsequent acts of arson, looting, the destruction of buildings.
It has been often cited in subsequent research that some of the overarching reasons behind the riots was poverty, unemployment and mounting frustration particularly towards the government and police. Eventually ‘Civil unrest’ was triggered in Tottenham in August 2011 by the frustrations of the police shooting of Mark Duggan and the London riots unfolded. The backdrop of the riots was one of widespread corruption. What people saw over 2011 was something more deviant and corrupt than stealing trainers from foot locker; in the expenses scandal we read about politicians stealing from the state; not just trainers but property and much more.Alongside that we had tabloid journalists, bending ethical and moral rules to invade privacy. And then there are bankers too alongside flaws with policing and the justice system. We all watched as people illegally cheated the various systems that had been put in place to prevent these things from happening. Our society has become dictated a diet of consumerism and capitalism ; To have more than you can- no matter what; to do what you wish has been a process of immorality and illegal opportunism demonstrated to the rest of us by some of the most powerful sectors in the government. Our own government taught us to seize what we want no matter the consequences; it would seem that some of these factors are as responsible and contributed to the build up to the riots as much as those who were actively part of the riots.
Some of the most insightful resources I have found on the riots have been these http://hutnyk.wordpress.com/texts/
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/series/reading-the-r…
They say far more eloquently and insightfully than I ever could about a very complex situation. I have also read with great interest as to the aftermath and response to those involved in the riots well commentated on by John Hutnyk and Tom Henri ‘Contexts for Distraction’ Journal for Cultural Research 2012.
So, I have been trying in this exhibition to explain to others, how my works have moved from literal depictions of broken space from the riots, to more abstracted landscapes. There is a purpose in this as well as my own creative development as an artist to move the discourse further. Politicians etc have been stuck in literal responses to the riots. Yet we all know that there are a number of deeper underlying problems to the riots and essentially they are still not being necessarily addressed. In the creative process, I also didn’t want to limit myself to just the viscerality of the riots. The important question about the riots, for me in this exhibition is how we all go forward from destruction. How can we stop being trapped in spaces dictated by others or trapped in a space we do not wish to inhabit? The development of my work is to create other spaces; to approach broken spaces and realign them, for in that, for me, for others there is reparation that is outside of other people’s control. Art is a language, a discourse, it is a language that you can control,develop and nurture and that is empowering. As ever, more to come….
