- Venue
- Ruthin Craft Centre
- Location
- Wales
The Ruthin Craft Centre’s Visitor’s Book lies open on the bench facing Julia Griffiths Jones’s installation Room within a Room, its pen attached to a length of string. Inside a child has written, ‘it looks like the Ginger Bread’s house’.
Cast against an enclosed, white-washed space, Griffiths Jones’s Room with a Room comprises a series of suspended, mild-wire-forged line drawings delineating the interior of a simple, rural cottage. A drawing in space, a monochromatic, domestic tableau of drawn things – tables, chairs, dressers – firmly rooted in Slovakian culture by surface pattern. It is everywhere, on the breast of a hanger-ed bolero-jacket, in strips on a row of cushions, a design on a pair of slippers, the edging on a pair of boots and the embroidery braiding a waistcoat. Here is pattern, decoration as consolation and delight.
Room within a Room and her new work on enamel is a response to Griffiths Jones’s journeying to Eastern Europe. Her sketchbooks bubble over with the sheer elation of it. Pages and pages of rich drawing, collaged with receipts, torn magazine images, sweet wrappers and travel tickets – anything and everything, this is a total immersion. The people she sketches are literally defined by their national costume – the pinstripes of an apron, the floral swirls of a woollen stocking describing and forming the body and the leg. Such delicious instantaneousness, unself-conscious and unlaboured, is translated beautifully onto the enamel, zinging with the same immediacy as Paul Hogarth’s reportage drawings or Ronald Searle’s Paris Sketchbook.
Restricting her palate to a triad of black, white and red, Griffiths Jones is consciously tapping into a traditional European cultural and literary symbolism with its long understood meanings of life and death, birth and sex. Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles is thick with it. Red and black are prostitutes’ colours, my Norwegian mother used to say. In Victorian times a black-edged envelope told of a death and white lilies proliferated at funerals. In old Jewish tradition the white sheet specked with blood from the bridal bed was hung from a window for all to see. And red lights, with their twin warnings of peril and pleasure, still shine in Amsterdam’s Haarlemstraat.
For all its sophisticated nuance of a Pop Art drawing by Patrick Caulfield or Michael Craig Martin, Room within a Room has a look of a pantomime stage-set or even a child’s uncoloured colouring book. It cannot be helped: there are just too many references (as the child in the Visitor’s Book spotted), deeply embedded during childhood, to fairy-tale. Perhaps it is intentional. There is certainly a playfulness to the piece. Sit at the bench long enough and a projection shows steam coming from the kettle, then orange dog-roses appear through the window blowing in the wind, followed by a night sky lit by a full moon.
A family of three take up residence on the bench. The teenage daughter chatters away, pointing with her finger as each new, subtle happening appears before them. This is not profound work, and the connections with Wales that Griffiths Jones states she wished to establish are not apparent. However, the joy of the drawing, the thrown shadows, the luscious attention to detail and the rush of warm, tender association is absolutely enough. More than enough. Room within a Room is simply gorgeous.
