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Standing in the Shadows of love.

The last few weeks I have been in a limbo-like state as recently, while returning from fishing, my husband turned his ankle and fell. The ensuing damage was extensive and he needs several weeks in a cast, with no weight put the leg at all. Not having so much time for my work has increased the desire to do it and at and at the same time helped me face up to the fact that I was hanging on to a piece of pretty weak work. It is an intervention to a sack, and has been hanging about in corners making me feel guilty for too long. I am going to burn it in the hope that fire will destroy and purify at the same time.

And so for the interim I have only short bits of time and the obvious thing to do was draw as this does not have the gravitas of “real” work. However I have only recently returned to drawing after a long absence and am still not back to a regular habit. I decided to use husband as a model as he couldn’t escape. I toiled for four hours on a “serious” drawing of him and made us both miserable. I still can’t look at this drawing without feeling physically sick.

No one could understand what I was so unhappy about as they judged it a good likeness. This made me think about lots of other artists who have driven themselves and close family and friends potty in the pursuit of betterment. The thing was, I was trying too hard to be better, to improve etc, instead of finding something to say.

The next evening the thought of trying to draw Peter’s head again gave me a nervous tic so I drew his great big blue foot instead and as I was drawing, his head (made small by perspective) crept into my peripheral vision and so I was able to come at it sideways, by stealth. Bingo. I have called the drawing Bigfoot and am able to look at it without my usual drawing dysmorphia.


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Grayson and Dorothy.

When this thing happened to me that I will tell you about shortly, I was in standing in a gallery filled with an installation by Dorothy Cross called Connemara at the Turner Contemporary in Margate. It is a thrilling mix of Steam-punk zoology, gothic anthropology, darkly Darwinesque with a spiritual otherworldliness. Anachronistically and ecologically speculative Cross explores the human/nature relationship sometimes with dashes of unexpected wit in a theatrical, properly immersive environment.

I had become deeply engaged with a piece on the wall of lost footware retrieved from the sea and cast in rubber and bronze and just at that moment I saw another work in another room across the way, from a distance. It caught me off-guard and I made and un-made snap judgements about it as I struggled towards processing its possible meaning.

It went something like this:

Oh look there’s an easel with a torpedo-bomb-type-thing stuck on it. I suppose that means it’s about art being powerful or shocking or something-Perhaps it’s anti-war? Like a slogan: War, What is it Good For? Absolutely Nothing. Well that’s been done before-surely too illustrative? Is she trying to shock us? Grayson Perry was talking about art not being able to shock us anymore…

“…art has lost one of its central tenets: its ability to shock.”

I walked nearer to the piece in the other room and discovered that the “torpedo” was in fact a model submarine of Lilliputian proportions with a delicious gilded surface. The easel was elegantly old and had been modified to “cradle” the submarine. Forced to re-interpret I read the notes:

Shark-Heart Submarine 2011 19th century easel, model submarine, laminated wood, oil-gilded in white gold, shark’s heart in glass jar with alcohol.

It was the opposite of what I had first thought, Cross was transforming the cultural identity of the shark from monster to beautiful, stream-lined, mummified, deified icon. From Jaws to Tutankhamun.

And then it all made sense (to me) in a slow-motion, quietly, reverse-shock way and again I mused over Grayson Perry’s ideas about art not being shocking anymore and that we are all too sophisticatedly bohemian. I think that the art world has been locked into a binary dialogue of Shocker and shockee a pairing that no longer serves us. Perhaps now we the audience, released from our constraining role, can allow works like: Shark-Heart Submarine to disturb or enlighten us, leaving us open to a re-arrange our thoughts but quietly, to shock us in reverse so that the experience will be less like Ian Drury’s Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick and more like the strangely reversed drum sounds in Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water. So that rather than an initial hit or swift pun, the effect of the art would be to fracture and ripple outwards and stay long in the psyche.

“…to detain and suspend us in a state of frustration and ambivalence and to make us pause and think rather than simply react.”

Grayson Perry (paraphrasing Professor Charlie Gere) in the 2nd Reith Lecture 2013

I like the quote above and think that the Installation by Dorothy Cross does exactly that but more discreetly and less sensationally than before.

Transcript of Grayson Perry’s 2nd Reith Lecture http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/radio4/transcripts/reith-lecture2-liverpool.pdf

Connemara at Turner Contemporary http://www.turnercontemporary.org/exhibitions/connemara


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