- Venue
- Found Space
- Location
- South West England
Hannah Prothero reviews Stowage: The work of more than 20 artists from around the UK in the shop windows of Exeter’s West Quarter.
17 April – 14 May 2010, Fore Street and New Bridge Street, Exeter
www.foundspace.co.uk/stowage.html
Curated by Gabrielle Hoad and Felicity Shillingford
Exeter’s West Quarter is one of the most interesting places in the South West that you can find yourself on a Saturday afternoon. It has a proliferation of independent shops, each one fulfilling a life dream for its owner. You can shop there for body piercing, tattoos, comics, herbal medicine, retro antiques, hair cuts, web design, scurrilous rags, a handmade guitar, a pint, a wedding dress, a milk shake, leather shoes made to fit your unevenly sized feet, a kebab, walking boots and sex toys.
It is the oldest part of Exeter: the first site of habitation by the Britons, well before the Romans arrived and made the roads straight. It was also the site of the worst slums in Exeter before they were cleared in the 60s. You don’t have to look hard to find the fissures in the 21st century gloss. The signs of the old medieval industries are all there: you can peer over precipices between the houses and see the leats (thin waterways which turned the water wheels). There is even a monument to patriarchal power: the Incorporation of Weavers, Fullers and Shearmen. A mysterious building with a panelled top room full of secrets from the medieval period. It was in this heavily timbered (and historically loaded) room that the Stowage contemporary art project kicked off its four-week run.
24 contemporary artists were commissioned by independent curators Gabrielle Hoad and Felicity Shillingford to make works for shop windows up and down the steep main street of the West Quarter. Each artist was given an old-fashioned sweet jar to place their work within but the contents were all their own. The curators negotiated spaces in the windows of 17 different shops – including even the nationally owned Co-op supermarket – something of a trophy venue! The viewer’s role is either to encounter the works by accident on their usual rounds; or browse the shops like an aficionado: a thin paper Stowage treasure map in hand, feeling a little like an Enid Blyton character in a dubious corner of town, searching for a ship in a bottle* (PS: if you didn’t read Enid Blyton’s The Ship of Adventure when you were 6 years old then you won’t get that reference. For the record I always cast myself as Lucy).
I set off on a sunny Saturday afternoon in April; the shopping zone in full swing. The first artwork was Ben Cook’s jar, coated in surf wax, situated in the outdoor retailer Moorland Rambler. I uncertainly asked the proprietor where the art was? Pleased to have caught me out, he said that I’d missed it: it was in the front window. It was then that I realised how well camouflaged these artworks would be. It was sandwiched between two pairs of hiking boots, looking faintly like a granite boulder, although more shapely. This was going to be fun.
Next up was Steven Paige’s Burnt Sugar jar in the Off the Hook vintage clothing shop. Etched on jar were descriptive words on the stages of making sugar into caramel: all the phrases looking like a euphemism for the preparation of hard drugs. It made a gently provocative comment on our culture’s favourite addiction to sugar. I was thrown back again into memory: the temple-aching stress of making boiled sweets and burning my fingers on a Sunday afternoon waiting for the damned pan of roiling sugar to get hot enough without boiling over again.
Gabrielle Hoad presented Is and Was, a photo of a severed hand in the window of a herbalist. The fact that it was a photo and not a real hand mattered little to its other-worldliness. It looked remarkably at home amongst the shop’s own appealing display of flowers and leaves for poultices and decoctions.
Bill Longshaw’s People Who Care is a small monument to the glories of the co-operative movement. The artwork jar was popped on the end of a shelf of stock, which happened to end in the front window, between gaps in the Co-op branding posters. His poignantly crafted statement intervened aptly between boxes of Persil Bio and Persil Non-bio.
Maddy Pethick’s jar contained a fold-out postcard book of cat portraits, within the window of the Read-and-Return bookshop. The artwork is deft: delighting in the joy of montage and the humour of found images that abound around us. I found myself unable to come down on one side of the fence or the other about the artwork’s tone. The flipbook was too caringly made to be entirely kitsch.
Felicity Shillingford’s artwork in Shaker Maker (the milkshake bar) was a claustrophobic mass of white birds in a jar, inspired by Victorian freak shop curios.
Kwong Lee is Director of the Castlefield Gallery in Manchester. His text-printed jar, Emergency in the Fantasy World / Indoor Pursuits shop seemed amusingly apt for its venue. We all need a jar like this in our lives as mental insurance against our own worst-case scenario.
On the search for Chris Knight’s artwork: The Wormery in Take Art. I stumbled into the middle of a children’s party and felt apologetic. It was such a touching scene. The children were decorating china plates whilst eating cup cakes and wearing pretty party dresses. I felt undeniably envious of them. The artwork itself featured jellied sweet worms in a jar of coloured sugar, altogether appropriate for the bejewelled scene before me.
Andrea Zapp is well placed to comment on our multiplicitous identities in the digital age: she runs the MA Media Lab at Manchester Metropolitan University. Much of the West Quarter relies on Brian Fowler Computers for technical salvation and her installation in his shop window featured a model satellite hanging menacingly over a little globe with figures. I reflected on the double-edged sword of escape and surveillance that digital culture permits. We stalk others as much as others stalk us through our online profiles. As I went on my way the Lou Reed song Satellite of Love became the unintentional soundtrack playing in my mind.
The antiques store Otto Retro is always a delight. Its stock of random objects never disappoints. You can buy everything from a German baby grand piano to the perfect gothic hairbrush set. The shop played host to several artworks that, to their credit, didn’t look terribly out of place. The Grimm North presented a miniature audio-visual installation, which you peeked into at your own risk.
Ben Langworthy and Scott Daniels’ work, in the window of Otto Retro and the Exeter Peace Shop, was a particular treat. Their playfully executed Magnificent Morse Mints showed a bottom-lit jar of clear sweets which emitted Morse code to the jar in the shop over the road: asking each other H-O-W-‘S…..B-U-S-I-N-E-S-S? The artworks came alive in the evening, when the West Quarter is no less lively, playing host with its plethora of bars.
There are many more excellent artworks in this contemporary art project than there is space to name here. The project abounds in integrity, playfulness and poignancy. It has been stylishly and knowingly executed. The artists and their hosts are well matched. It is a true collaboration between independent artist/curators; and retailers who have no allegiance to contemporary art but are, in their own way, going out on a limb in their daily lives, with risky commercial ventures that are intensely creative in their own right.
