- Venue
- Tabernacle Gallery, Notting Hill, London
- Location
- London
When is there too much work in an exhibition? How can an exhibition featuring the dominance of materials and multiple artists be curated? Where is a good venue to bring diverse artists together to produce a show? How do you tell a story about another story?
This was an exhibition that relied on a bold ‘holding’ vision and a need to embrace improvisation, both for the artists and the organisers; a collective called Temporal Lobe from Glasgow School of Art. The collective took the idea of a ‘narrative about a narrative’ one step further, by inviting 5 london-based artists to show along side them.
It was DIY curation that worked IRL.
Bad Yarns as an organising principle alluded to stories of travel, adventure and exploration whilst pointing to a narrative around yarns as a material prompt for the artists concerned – or their individual definition of it.
Taking in an overview of the exhibition from the gallery door, it was easy to feel invited in to the space, yet the space had a slightly menacing feeling. This seemed to be on purpose, as one of the first works encountered was black fabric emerging from pipework from an insitu pillar, as if under pressure from an unknown third force. Somehow the fabric kept its ghostly shape, like a dementor from Harry Potter. It dared you to touch it, you knew you dare not.
Whether on purpose or not, this drew the eye to another textile piece that sat derectly behind the shadow ghost. From a distance it was difficult to make out what the wall-mounted piece was but getting close to it became apparent this was an eviscerated tent draped forlornly from what appeared to be a bike storage hook nailed to the wall while the textile rested on the floor. This tent-based piece felt like a minor threat or warning; it had been gutted in a hurry but hung with an artist’s touch, facilitating it’s commanding position in the space.
Never sure how much a curator’s job is serendipitous or planned there were two pieces next to the dead tent that featured reconstitued bicycle inner tubes, half-woven over a steel frame. The tubes still had the inflation valves attached. Contemplating how many miles, hills, postcodes and puncturs these tubes had witnessed was a fascinating thought – bad yarns indeed.
There was a lot of work in the space yet it felt a cohesive, thoughtful narrative had been achieved. It was striking to witness how the architecture of the space had been included and brought to the fore. Utilising small architectural foibles to accent some of the work, especially those pieces reliant on the floor for their display point.
All this was brought into sharp focus when I spoke to a tutor from the Slade, who was scratching his chin as he wandered around. His take was ‘this wouldn’t work on paper but it really does in real life’. I was then thrust into a thought process of how you actually achieve that. A combination of planning, improvisation and luck, I suspect (but you need to leave room for the luck part and this is seldom done with most exhibitions).
A gaggle of gallery hoppers had started to chirp noisely behind me. As I turned to give them a hard stare I noticed the piece mounted on the wall that had caught their attention. It transpired this was a ceramic piece, like a handsome contemporary gargoil hung at (my) head height on the wall. With a scaley finish it echoed the printed painting next to it in an almost identical colour of green. This is very good curation which takes seriously the interplay and dialogue betwee pieces in a group show that could easily not work well in a relatiively small space.
Wall mounted ceramics are not that common, ceramics typically being displayed on a plinth. Yet there were no plinths used in the exhibition, despite there being several smaller sculptural works presented directly on the floor. In a way, it appeared as if someone had stolen the plinths, leaving these sculptures to fend for themselves on the ground.
Viewing these pieces forced viewers to bend down, take a closer look, survey from a height and slow their passage through the space. Again clever curation or maybe ‘anti-curation’; though you have to know the rules to be confident in which ones you can successfully break.
A wholly wierd sculptural piece titled ‘Social Bug’, consisting of a pair of reclaimed climbing shoes seemingly co-joined and painted a very dark matt black, rested within the existing ‘frame’ of a trap door. This odd and uncomfortable work was over-looked by a painting of a cockroach (another type of bug), which appeared to be crawling off the canvas and up the wall towards a wall vent in close proximity. This was a great pairing of work and told a strong story, whatever you wanted that story to be.
Just when you thought there was time to breath, a red glow caught my attention. It eminated from a piece that was not visible from the front of the gallery. Mounted to the back of the pillar was a sculptural form that gave the impression it was floating or levitating through mysterious powers.
The piece confounded me and I had to search the exhibition set list to see what it comprised. What we had was a rusted steel filing cabinet drawer front with two round holes cut out, an LED light behind and a domestic aquarium heater (cable cut) fitting neatly to the drawr lugs at the front. It was a piece of contradictions, juxtapositions and it was sold. What do I know.
As I took a step back from viewing the levitating piece, I narrowly avoided a couple of kids that had been drawn into the space to one of the pieces that looked like but was definately not a toy. The sculpture presented as a small but potent creature, not disimilar to one conjured by David Lynch (I wont use the term ‘Lynchian’ but it would be fitting). This small Big Cat figure was sitting on a reclaimed standless snare drum. It had the dark vibe of a devilish deviant but at the same time the humour of a trampolining terror.
I wanted to find safety and solice in this exhibition but even the paintings were grift-giving. A stack of 3 paintings, human in scale were making their presence felt. They were screen prints mixed with collage and painting of urban scenes gone wrong – more malneficence, though certainly not dark in colour. The trypic spoke of scense of an end point, a finish line, the last act. They contained human figures, hieroglyphs, diagrams as if giving instructions about what to do when the impending doom they signal finally arrives. Yet, they have a playfulness and a warmth that is both engaging and comforting. Signalling the calm before the storm, perhaps?
Other paintings comprised over-painted layers of textiles, fabrics, shirts, vests roughly stapled to their stretchers – bodily, human traces, handmade. They fitted right in, they spoke out their own story and their painting was rough yet considered. They could have been made in minutes or taken months, they could have been left for dead or brought back to life.
One of these paintings sat above another larger painting from a different artist. It was presented as landscape and echoed the painting that was in dialogue with the ceramic piece. I say painting but it was printed silk of a demolition site or similar urban scene of destruction or construction, you choose.
The over all feel of the exhibition was dark with hope, unrelenting change anchored in humanity, pesimissm fit for today tempered with humour and cunning.
Bad Yarns? Yes. Good exhibition? Definately.
