Art From London Markets, a-n feature

With my hand nearly back to normal by the end of this week I have started making again, I have been looking at some very unseasonal raspberries. So with a treat for my daughters taste buds rather than an eye on the environmental impact and inspired by the burgeoning greens around me, now that spring is here, I have been playing with the pinks of the fruit against shades of fresh green, and playing with the scale of the green and pink areas. Which of course got me thinking about how we have become accustomed to getting whatever we want when we want, and how this has been going on and increasing for a long time. The roots of British importation of food from beyond Europe go back to Tudor times and share roots with the start of the Empire. This same root that transformed us over the twentieth century with the dissolution of the Empire into a more modern kind of international liberal society, which at its best made room for cultural diversity and at its worst discriminated along the lines of difference rooted in supremacist ideologies that were used to justify the notions of Empire in the first place. Interestingly a lot of the foods we think of as quintessentially British have their heart in this trade: Sweet Spice as imports in the late medieval and early to late renaissance periods were status symbols. This is why much of our celebratory traditional foods are spicy and contain dried fruit, mince pies, simnel cake, wedding cake, Christmas pudding……. These rich foods mark celebrations because the ingredients were sourced abroad and were expensive, so saved initially for the elite and then once they permeated the rest of society were for special occasions. The ease with which we have been able to import fresh rather than dried or preserved produce over large distances is relatively new, and increased and expanded dramatically in the 20th century with faster ships, better cooling technologies and with flight. And since the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s there has been an IMF drive for export led development in less developed countries, adding to the variety of that supply. The pattern of this development “encouraged” by the IMF was frequently agricultural products first especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, where balancing the need for overall economic development and food security for the local population was not always straight forward. (See earlier posts covering this). So we have unseasonal products in our shops and street markets because of this trade, and trade with Europe and Asia. What we do need to be sure of is that the producers are getting a fair price, a price that improves their lives, and that the investments in agriculture go a long way to increasing local food security and do not exacerbate local food price rises, which would of course increase food insecurity for the people in the community not benefitting from the trade. The current focus of the UN ZeroHunger campaign (@zerohunger)is for agricultural development with food security and sustainability of the local people at its heart: It is a shift in emphasis in response to the late 20th century emphasis on export and its failures. And as it is early March and tomorrow is international Women’s day, it should be remembered that in Sub Saharan Africa and in fact if you take the globe as a whole, most of the worlds farm workers are women, and that this is especially true in countries with farming practices which are labour intensive. The best development models of course take those women with them, the worst leave them behind. Which green shall I use here?

So in the last few months I have been planning and working up to making some bigger pieces and the first piece was completed today.

In this piece the scale is significant as a reflection on commercial marketing and the interplay between the material object and its representation in the process of sale.

In additional I wanted to focus in on the way that international trade sits in an uncomfortable role in the history of food production both historically and in contemporary times in relation to slavery on the one hand and  secure food procurement and economic opportunities on the other, this relates to the materials used in making this work: cadmium hue and copper which have their own beauty and own poison and are intimately tied up in the importation of basic goods.

As I worked, moving it along, adding and subtracting colour, and images and gild to reach the final goal.  Things coming in and out and covered and recovered.  Getting started and staying focussed proved at times challenging.  But deadlines are good.

And having worked that big, I am thinking about the possibilities of even bigger…

And then Frankie sent me this link, and while I have a more English rather than Japanese work ethic, this is  a man making  art out of his life….

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYN7p8dvr64

So the kids are back at school and I have time to spend on the new larger scale piece I have been planning, but suddenly all those domestic jobs I have been putting off are calling me…… this is the disadvantage of working home. SO I have fixed the door handle on the kitchen door, resealed around the shower tray,cleared the drains, found a leak, and used the washing machine so much it has broken down. All this displacement activity is then commented on by my partner who in a pleased voice says you have been busy… grrr. Displacement activities….. but I have a deadline creeping up and need to get on with it. Given that the activities listed are all time consuming but mindless I supose I could rename it “thinking time”…but it is now time for action and not DIY. As I write this the washing machine hums thanks to the plumber, and climbing on the roof requires two adults present so get to work

Slavery and trade: So preparing my piece for John Moores I have been thinking about trade and Liverpool both the current increase in imports represented by the Tetley deal and international trade in Liverpool in the past. You can’t then get away from the fact of the history of slavery and the role of Liverpool in the slave trade triangle. So to come back to the present in October the Modern Slavery Act 2015 was published, which means that very big companies will have to publicise what they do to prevent slavery being part of their supply chain. Initially I felt a hurray moment, and then I went to the government website, and it became clear that big business with over 35million turn over are required to publicise what they are doing to try to prevent slavery being part of the supply chain, not actually show that there is no slavery in their supply chain. So it is down to consumers to then find the information and…. boycott I guess, to actually make them do it…..hardly robust anti slavery law. I guess it will make journalists jobs a bit easier, but not strong enough.

And then more displacement activities on Monday leave me watching TV Hugh Fernley Whitingstall’s recent anti-waste campaign on TV, and the Aldi critique in channel 4 illustrate how there can be a great big gap between what companies say they do and what they actually do, and actually these issues are not unrelated. Excessive consumerism is at the heart of both, and in the model of the Anti-Slavery Act the consumer is expected to be the police. Funny that I thought that was the job of governments.

You may remember that at the time of the Pocket Arts Place and Proximity Story collection I was having an unconscious luddite patch (I put this down to my West Country origins, where resistance to technology has history, as does persistent retrospection). Unfortunately this means that some of the stories recorded then will have to be presented in my words. At the event, while I was struggling, it was recommended that I buy a dictaphone, which I will before the next collection, a nice piece of old tech.

This is the first story:

She had chatted to me about the bacchanalia of seasonal strawberry markets in Poland when she was a child,  where in her family the kitchen table would be pilled high with a mountain of strawberries, which would be simultaneously on the table, on every surface and cooking in pans on the stove. This created an overwhelming sensory overload of gorgeousness and added to this was the joy of a small child allowed to eat however much she wanted.   Talking about the comparison between North End Road Market and the markets she grew up with in Poland she said:

” I just do compare them because I am missing the lack, the total lack of inhibition of food markets, of Polish fruit markets, big piles, big heaps of fruit in season and here what I  found were these little small boxes, which were so restraining, and so sort of mean, yeah, packaging all that wealth and vivacity, that life energy into little plastic boxes, yeah…but still there the fruit and veg is seasonal …and I do shop [here at North End Road] I do go round and I do enjoy the colour and shape and try to find what I fancy that day, so more a spontaneous shopper and I do appreciate that they sell (indistinct word) these days, everywhere  [prompted to talk about the excess she continued] Maybe its the memory of a child…well I wasn’t really a child the last time I was regularly shopping there, so yeah, because you’ve got just, just the  piles and heaps of stuff and it was like you could actually imagine yourself actually rolling in that in a helpless way, and the smell obviously, the beautiful smell, and the stall after stall after stall where you have the indoor market….just something to watch and marvel, and then when you regain conscience…buy, go home and eat, eat, eat until you cannot eat any more.  So there was this abundance, bacchanal, that feeling that it can go on for ever, no restriction, no end. [You also talked about seasonality] Yeah, which changed now, we joined the rest of the world, we import from all over the place, but I love to eat, er seasonal fruit.

Strawberry Bachanal