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‘Cultivating dead trees’: the legacy of Paul Nash as an artist of trauma, wilderness and recovery’
Get PDFTaking as its starting point the planting of a number of dead trees in the National Memorial Arboretum at Alrewas, Staffordshire, this article examines the iconic, pictorial and metaphorical value of trees - living, dying and dead - in garden and arboreta settings. Arguing that the image of inert nature strikes at the very principle of seasonal recovery and annual cycles of regeneration, the article explores the representation of danger, devastation and recuperation in the work of two contemporary British painters who each have a keen understanding of the totemic monumentality of trees, both within and outside garden and arboreta settings. Drawing upon political contexts in Northern Ireland and Iraq, and on environmental challenges along the east coast of England, both painters reference the work of the British painter Paul Nash. His understanding of decay and regeneration, and the cyclic depiction of death and life through nature, provides a connective tissue that links the major themes of remembrance, iconography and design that are at the heart of the National Memorial project at Alrewas
Westway: a portrait of a community
No full textWestway
This was a solo exhibition of 55 photographs shown at St. Martin-in-the-Fields’ Gallery, London. A print from the exhibition was shortlisted for the World Photography Organisation’s 2013 Awards; selected for the Royal Photographic Society’s annual print exhibition; and short listed for the Taylor Wessing Photographic Prize for 2013, exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery.
Research Questions
The research explored contemporary society’s reliance and infatuation with the automobile. It examined how individuals and small communities are affected by intense urbanisation; whether living in such an environment had short or long term influences on life opportunities, including education and/or employment; and how a community copes with being dissected by a major structure that has little purpose for them. The research questions broadened during the course of the research to examine the influence of urban redevelopment along the route of the A40 encouraged through changing land values as land that was once worth nothing, became worth millions.
Research Imperatives
The research was primarily sociological, documenting the lives of those living beneath and in the shadow of the A40 flyover in west London which bulldozed through the heart of North Kensington in the 1960s taking with it 600 homes and forcing 1,000 people to leave the area. It also employed methodologies of oral history, using selected quotations from interviewees to accompany the images, developed during a previous project Hard Times (2011).
The research involved working to win the confidence of the subjects Wenham-Clarke intended to photograph and gaining their consent; this included a Gypsy community where outsiders were not normally welcomed.
This project provided unprecedented insights into the homes, businesses, sports facilities and educational centres of those living under the Westway; it also highlighted the multi-cultural aspects of the area and revealed some very positive aspects of living in a modern, ethnically diverse Britain
'Write off the Map'. an exhibition on forests, history, and social and environmental memory
Get PDFThis exhibition investigates the properties of forest memory through text, archive, and “xylarium”, or wood collection. Between the French horticultural term “forest trauma” and Robert Pogue Harrison’s “forests of nostalgia”, a whole discipline around history, witnessing, and the memorial qualities of woodland opens up. Art works examining the cultural expression of time and history in the forest are placed here alongside archival photographs, small press texts, artefacts, and museum objects, in an old, low-lit belfry designed by Sir John Soane.
The use of trees and woodland to invoke the past is all around us, from local tree registers and writings (with titles like Legacy Trees, Our Living Memorials, Heritage Trees of Ireland, and Silent Witness: Diary of a Historic Tree), to the Forestry Commission’s 2005 policy for ancient and native woodland entitled “Keepers of Time”. This idea of “Keepers of Time”, of trees being stewards for human memory and the human story, catches the imagination of the government and the media; but it is also the subject of a number of works by artists, writers, and researchers. Relics, by Richard Skelton and Autumn Richardson, uses the linguistic record to chart eleven lost tree genera, identified by pollen grain analysis in the 1960s. Edmund Hardy’s A Forest Set fragmentarily re-quotes Rachael Holtom’s Echoes of Epping Forest: Oral history of the 20th Century Forest, drawing attention to the logic by which historical experience is ‘accessed’ in the forest, and by which different voices become federated in a single account of social memory.
Paul Gough’s Upas Tree drawings take inspiration from Paul Nash’s wartime paintings, which link corpses to shattered or blasted trees, but also from the enigmatic fable of the dreaded Upas Tree, based in turn on the tale of the poisonous anchar tree, first revealed by 18th century botanist Erasmus Darwin. The French term “forest trauma”, used for post-war ecological devastation, is echoed by the linking of man and tree in the commonly used phrase ‘veteran tree’
BODYWORKS
No full textBodyworks
This was a solo exhibition shown at Centrespace Gallery, Bristol, which selects and showcases the work of contemporary and emerging new artists. The images were shown as part of The Format International Photography Festival, Derby (2013); a print was also selected for the Royal Photographic Society’s annual print exhibition (2013)
Research Imperatives
Initial research explored technological advances in the manufacture of prosthetic limbs over a seventy year period from the 1940s to the present day and included devices made for the victims of war, accident and disease.
Despite the huge advances that have been made, particularly in the last ten years, the research found that there was still demand for prosthetic limbs made to designs dating back to the 1940s; these were primarily for people who had been issued with such limbs many years ago but did not wish to update. Craftsmen manufacture these traditional limbs from wood, metal and leather, exactly as they were made to supply the seriously injured survivors of the Second World War.
The research focused on one such prosthetic limb manufacturer that continues to produce both traditionally made and modern limbs. Wenham-Clarke explored every corner of the factory which allowed him to locate significant objects that conveyed a narrative of both the patients and the workers. Many of the objects found and recorded had been stored out of sight for decades.
The images exhibited in Bodyworks high-lighted the craftsmanship and the many tools used to manufacture the limbs. They record images of a dwindling work force, the last of their kind as no new workers are being trained, operating within a factory that was originally built for a staff team fifteen times bigger than the present day. They also reflect public interest in morbidity and its fascination with the artificial
Banksy:The Bristol Legacy
Get PDFIn the summer of 2009 Bristol saw a remarkable phenomenon that made international news. An estimated 300,000 people queued for hours, often in pouring rain, for admission to the city’s museum & art gallery. They had been attracted by the media hype surrounding an exhibition ambiguously entitled ‘Banksy vs the Bristol Museum’.
There have been many celebratory books about Banksy, but this is the first non-partisan documentation of the Bristol event and an attempt to assess its local and wider impact. More than a dozen commentators, including art curators, historians, economists, journalists and local government managers, attempt to answer a raft of questions: Is Banksy a subversive influence or merely a bit of fun? Why is Banksy so important to Bristol? Are we dealing with art, ‘street art’ or graffiti? Where does the exhibition leave Bristol as an epicentre of ‘street art’? What was its economic impact?
The book looks at the setting up of the show and questions the need – other than to conform to the required Banksy mystique – for secrecy.
Bristol City Council took an unprecedented risk in allowing the Banksy team a free run of its galleries. The implications of this for future museum practice and for State encouragement of the popular arts are dealt with in detail.
In the wake of the exhibition the council designated a run-down area of the inner city for a ‘street art’ bonanza, inviting artists from around the world. The book attempts to judge the success of that initiative. Finally, a practising lawyer asks whether Banksy’s work can be given ‘listed building’ consent
Animating with Facts: The Performative Process of Documentary Animation in the ten mark (2010)
No full textThis article examines how animated films re-present and re-interpret real world occurrences, people and places, focusing on an area that has been overlooked to date: the process of performance and how this manifests itself in animated documentary films. Not simply a notion of ‘performance’ as we might understand it in an ‘acting’ sense (someone playing a role in a re-enactment), but that of the animator performing specific actions in order to interpret the factual material. The central questions addressed are: how does an understanding of ‘performance’ and the related term ‘performativity’ help us to frame animated/nonfictional acting? What ontological questions are raised by thinking about notions of acting in animation (and the performance instantiated in the very action of animating)? How do viewers relate to, interpret or ‘believe in’ animated films that are asserting real/factually-based stories? The article uses a recent film, the ten mark, as a case study to explore possible answers to these questions
'Your loving friend, Stanley' The Great War correspondence between Stanley Spencer and Desmond Chute
Get PDFWhen serving as an orderly in the Beaufort Military Hospital, Bristol during the First World War, the young Stanley Spencer met Desmond Chute, a 20-year old aesthete and scion of a noted Bristol theatre family. A close friendship ensued, as the 31 letters in this collection attest. Far more sophisticated and better educated, Chute introduced the older man (Spencer was 24 when they met) to classical literature and great music and, perhaps most crucially, to the Confessions of St Augustine. Chute’s influence on Spencer s intellectual development cannot be exaggerated. Spencer’s often illustrated letters include some written while awaiting posting overseas, others from the battlefields of Macedonia give glimpses of his tribulations in a theatre of war, along with extraordinarily well-wrought reminiscences of Cookham, colourfully populated with places and characters. A few, concluding, letters were written from Fernlea back in his home village, and Hampstead in the 1920s.
Desmond Chute (1895-1962) was for a while at the Slade School of Art. He became an assistant to Eric Gill, and involved in the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic. He was admitted as a Catholic priest in 1927, moving to Italy where he was a friend of Ezra Pound. He had some success as a published writer and playwright, including a radio play broadcast by the BBC in 1955. All the letters are transcribed for the modern reader; some are also reproduced facsimile with Spencer s illustrations. A series of introductory essays, Stanley Spencer at war and peace , by Paul Gough give the background to the correspondence, discuss its importance to Spencer, and provide previously unpublished information about the Chute family. Archive photographs provide a visual contex
Hard Times
No full textHard Times
This was a solo exhibition of 20 photographs shown at St. Martin-in-the-Fields’ Gallery, London which showcases the work of contemporary artists. The exhibition, which was also shown in Bournemouth, Birmingham, Inverness and Wick, reached a wide audience and received numerous awards including the Association of Professional Photographers’ Gold Award.
Research Imperatives
Hard Times shed light on the hidden lives of Britain’s homeless through a collection of photographs of Big Issue vendors, about whom little is known.
The underpinning research was essentially sociological. Wenham-Clarke researched at the Big Issue headquarters at Waterloo identifying individuals and patterns of experience, identifying a set of issues and responding to them in ways that were intended to move the ground of public debate. It was also practice-led research involving testing out composition, medium and mode of delivery. A further aspect of the research touched on methodologies of oral history using selected quotations from interviewees to accompany the images. Building on previous work by Shelter and other organisations (Ken Loach, Cathy Come Home, 1966 and The Crisis Commission, Somerset House, March-April 2012) it also sought to develop the use of art as a tool against homelessness.
Wenham-Clarke’s research took him on a journey to locations mainly hidden from public view. He researched where people slept rough or in temporary accommodation within and without cities. The research involved not only identifying appropriate locations and individuals but also importantly working to win the confidence of the subjects he intended to photograph and gaining their consent.
The research highlighted the fact that unemployment and rough sleeping involves people of all ages, both male and female; it challenged common perceptions around the causes and circumstances of homelessness, and provided a fascinating insight into individual’s personal history, their relationships, the challenges they face and their hopes for the future
‘A Terrible Beauty’: War, British Artists and the First World War
Get PDFAs war broke out across Europe in 1914 the Vorticist painter Wyndham Lewis advised: ‘You must not miss a war, if one is going! You cannot afford to miss that experience’. He may have been playfully ironic, but he recognised that the Great War presented a set of complex challenges, that might make or break reputations at a critical juncture in British art. Many artists, poets and writers have had to live with the uncomfortable recognition that conflict fuels their muse, invigorating the imagination and honing their creativity.
This book explores a diverse group of those artists and their work, from the conservative draughtsmanship of Scottish etcher Muirhead Bone to the irreverent angularity of the young gunner William Roberts; from the publicity-soaked antics of Richard Nevinson to the deluded ambitions of Sir William Orpen. In it, Paul Gough examines the work of those who were made famous by the war, and those whose reputations were almost irretrievably damaged. He explores in detail the wartime lives of fifteen artists – many of whom saw active service -- who are central to the way we now visualize the War on the Western Front and on more distant battlefields in Macedonia and Gallipoli
Lost Islands: inventing Avalon, destroying Eden
No full textIn this interdisciplinary examination of the cultural history of islands, the author draws upon folklore, mythology, literature, popular culture, and environmental science to delve into humanity’s long fascination with islands. Drawing upon extensive field research undertaken exploring islands off the coast of Britain (Iona; Lundy; Bardsey; Isles of Scilly; Isle of Man; Holy Island; St Michael’s Mount; Isle of Wight; the Western Isles), which included a week’s solo writing retreat on the tiny Bardsey Island off the tip of the Llyn Peninsula, northwest Wales; as well as archival research pouring over early accounts of explorers; the experiential research as a professional storyteller enthralling audiences with tales of magical islands; and the latest climate science on the impact of Global Warming on sea levels and migration; Lost Islands attempts to understand our collective fascination with islands, real and imaginary. The way we have tendency to narrativize islands, projecting our desires and fears upon them (a tendency with antecedents back to the earliest of literature, such as the ‘echtrai’ or wonder voyages of Celtic saints such as St Brendan), show that an island can be an act of the imagination as well as a geographical fact. Interweaving erudite analysis with personal embodied anecdote, and an interdisciplinary approach, Lost Island challenges the islandisation of disciplines and traditions. A study of the littoral and the liminal, the monograph adopts a hybrid style blending the creative and critical to bring alive the ‘threshold’ quality of such places, sometimes described as ‘thin places’. The result is a kind of palimpsest of different texts and modes of thinking, and as such Lost Islands (illustrated throughout by the author’s own photographs) is research ‘for’ islands as well ‘through’ and ‘into’ them, via a creative-critical practice (Frayling, 1993)