Alice Neel - Hot Off The Griddle - Barbican

I went to the Barbican exhibition with a group of students from Camberwell. We realised how close we were to the Filet gallery and so after finishing our invigilation we walked to the Barbican. It was a pleasure to see it with a group and share that experience as I mostly go to galleries alone.

The exhibition was large, with over 70 of her portraits. These were displayed alongside excerpts from film, writing and photos which gavw insight into Neel, but also the backstory to many of those who sat for her over the years. Her struggles with lovers, with her mental health and her role as a mother.

A radical figurative painter her paintings are intimate and comfortable portraits of people we almost feel we know; we recognise their poses and their mannerisms. Neel said that she would converse with her sitters until they relaxed enough and then she would see who they really were. She painted ‘to try to reveal the struggle, tragedy and joy of life’. They might be naked, or legs akimbo, but they are never posed. She painted people as they are, how she found them, imperfect, often fragile, exposed, but always so believable and so human.

Mohammed Sami

‘The Point O’ at Camden Art Centre, London

Electric Chair 2019-20

Ten Siblings, 2021, acrylic on linen

The Weeping Lines, 2022

Every Day is Ashura II, 2020. Acrylic on linen

Sami was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1984, and lived through the Iran-Iraq conflict, two Gulf wars, the US-led invasion and sectarian violence. Before being granted refugee status in Sweden. He now lives in London.

His large scale paintings are devoid of people and yet carry their trace. I found them Powerful, unsettling and with a sense of an unspoken and subtle menace. They evidence in his paintings obliquely articulates the trauma of war, loss and displacement he experienced during his childhood. By renegotiating his past experience through the medium of paint he creates ambiguous, haunting compositions which depict everyday objects, mattresses, chairs and hanging clothes, often darkly shadowed, blurred or fragmented.

The paintings of the mattresses piled up, the clothes on hangers or washing llines all speak of claustrophobic environments, with people having to live together in stressful, tight conditions. In his interview with Elizabeth Fullerton Sami says ‘I’ve learnt that the power of invisibility is much more powerful than the power of visibility.” As he wants his work to make us the viewer question ‘ what sort of decisions are being made in these rooms. ‘

Mike Nelson

Extinction Beckons - Hayward Gallery

Ken Nwadiogbu

Jesse Akele

““My intent has always been to make immersive works that operate on multiple levels. They should have a narrative, a spatial aspect, but also a psychological effect on the senses: you’re seeing and feeling one thing whilst your brain is trying to override this and tell you something else.””

— Mike Nelson, Press Release, February 21, 2023

I was feeling slight trepidation about my upcoming visit to see Mike Nelson’s ‘Extinction Beckons’ at the Hayward gallery. Firstly, could it possibly live up to my expectations and secondly the rather stringent safety brief before going in made me feel I was about enter the ‘danger zone’. Rather than failing to meet my expectations, it surpassed them. l couldn’t have loved more the labyrinth world I had been so soberly briefed about before entering the exhibition. The madness of having all these choices on which way to go, once inside the ‘Deliverance and The Patience’. The tiny corridors and rooms, the red lighting of the photographic studio, the opportunity to immerse myself in this extraordinary experience. I have been to the Hayward many times, but it was as if the space had been expanded to fill the maze of Nelson’s monumental work, beguiling, unsettling and transformative.

In the first room the hoarder and scavenger in me relished the shelves overflowing with unreachable histories in ‘I, Imposter’ (2011), the fragments of objects, now uncoupled from their original purpose, stacked high around you, dimly lit by the red light of a photographer’s darkroom. It felt intimate and slightly subversive to be there, as if I had snuck in through the back of some large museum to find I had wandered into their forbidden exhibits store, where everything was just out of reach.

Moving on into “The Deliverance and the Patience’ you couldn’t help but feel the thrill of a child, randomly selecting different doors, taking you onwards through numerous corridors and rooms, but the materials found there begins to unnerve, confuse and disorientate. There were moments where I had to remind myself, I am in a gallery, I am not in some anarchic lost space, for the sounds were muffled and distant and once in it was not easy to find your way out. I was strangely comforted when I came across other lost visitors to the exhibition in this warren of abandoned rooms. It is as if the people who had occupied the room had only just left, tarot cards strewn across tables, a coat on the back of a chair, instructions not to spit, a travel agent’s office with no one there to book your way out. It feels dystopian, but what part of me brings that interpretation to the fore, for it is up to me, the viewer to make sense of what I was seeing. It is as Adrian Searle says ‘the more forensic you get as a viewer, the more out of control the story, if it is a story, gets.’

This piece was originally commissioned for the Venice Biennale in 2001. Although it is a reincarnation Nelson never makes the same structure in exactly same way again, thereby disrupting and disturbing any sense of the familiar. Once you have found the exit you are left with the lingering sense of doubt, what did you miss, can you go around again, but you are moving on in one direction and there is no going back.

Nelson says he likes building big things that you can walk through ‘because that is immediately effective,’ he says. ‘In some ways, it’s quite childish, which isn’t a bad thing. You don’t have to be versed in art history, but if you are, that gives it another level.’ It is the troubling darkness of the histories within the rooms, empty of people, but full of tales which stays with you. They are stage sets and you are there to decipher the objects and how they are placed, for yourself. He says ‘A lot of it’s to do with an empathetic reaction to the things, to the matter….I think that’s possible where the greatest success is. If you were to try to articulate it, it might sound trite. But to actually feel it is something different’.

Leaving the labyrinth behind you make your way upstairs to Triple Bluff Canyon (2004). You move into a space occupied by a woodshed, remnants of car tyres submerged in by 40 tonnes of sand. It is extraordinary and discombobulating to find yourself here, in a normally white gallery space and with a sense of menace as you become aware of the unsettling cement passageway bending off the right, its destination hidden by the curve of the structure. This work is Nelson’s take on Robert Smithson’s, land art piece Partially Buried Woodshed (1970). The original was covered with earth and was then left to slowly decompose over time as vegetation would begin to consume it. Smithson hoped the piece would not only go on to decay but also would acquire ‘its own history’’, which of course it did but in a tragic and unexpected way when four students were killed on the site during a Vietnam protest. It was later burned to the ground by an arsonist. Triple Bluff Canyon was created during the Iraq war and buried in the sea of sand are found worn tyres and empty oil barrels to highlight that there are still wars and energy conflicts today. As I age and with it many inevitable losses, I find my focus is increasingly fixed on the subjects Nelson’s work deals with. Entropy, fading memories and collapsing systems, whether nation states or family structures.

Moving through the passageway adjunct to the Triple Bluff Canyon is the projection room (2004) which is a dark room leading towards a dead end for you are in the back of the bunker and the sand piled high forces you to retrace your steps. And so, the exhibition continues with further elements of his previous exhibitions ‘Asset Strippers’, Studio Apparatus for Kunsthalle Münster and ‘The Amnesiacs’, culminating in a replica of the studio he worked in after leaving Chelsea College of Art.

Seen within the context of Bourriaud ‘Altermodernism’, Nelson’s work ‘traverses cultural landscapes saturated with signs’(Bourriaud (2009). As spectators we become actors in a chaotic journey across time and space, discovering the identities of the missing in a place where the very notion of territory is an illusion. The spectator becomes the player and their ‘body and decisions activate, the work’. Nelson says ‘it’s as if these rooms were quite suddenly abandoned by the characters’ (Grayson (2001). These in-between places, below the surface places are places of fragility, psychological but also politically where marginal identities are hidden beneath our ‘prevailing ideologies’.

It really is a remarkable exhibition as Nelson creates ‘installations that allow the viewer to walk in and occupy an idea, rather than have the idea imposed on you’ (Atwood, R 2011). His work feels very archival being akin to a’ mise-en-scene’ from another period. His use of object to evoke story and memory, the work you as the audience have to do to decipher the story, and the power of immersion; these are all reasons why Nelson’s work is so compelling to me.

Atwood, R. (2011). Britain’s Curator of Garbage. [online] ARTnews.com. Available at: https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/britains-curator-of-garbage-414/) [Accessed 28 May 2023].

Mike Nelson (Jun–Sep 2001) PEER UK. (online) : http://www.peeruk.org/mike-nelson (Accessed: 28 May 2023).

Mike Nelson: Extinction beckons; David Hockney: Bigger and closer – review (2023) The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/feb/26/mike-nelson-extinction-beckons-david-hockney-bigger-and-closer-review (Accessed: 28 May 2023).

Tate (no date) Altermodern: Tate Britain, Tate. (online) Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/altermodern (Accessed: 28 May 2023).

Chelsea MA 23

Yuyue Zhou

Dirk Tsai

Qian Sun

I went back to Chelsea to see the work of Chelsea’s Graduate Diploma Alumni who had gone onto to do the MA, including Dirk and Quin. I really admire Quin’s paintings and have a few of them at home - we did swaps last year. Dirk uses various materials to paint on and is excitingly experimental with his exploration of surfaces. I had not seen Yuyue’s work before, but I liked the soft pink hues and palette which belie the dark contents such as the above picture of a beheaded baby like female being served on a platter with spider mothers adding to the sense of unease.

London 23 - City & Guild BA 23

Seraphina Mutscheller

Eddie Jones

Daniela Plou

Another trip to a graduation show, this time to see the work of one of my foundation year friends but of course also to see the work of the other students graduating in 23. Daniela Plou’s work appealed as her work starts from photographs of family, A habit I have been want to do! She paints quickly and dramatically to capture that sense of flux and time passed. Seraphina’s work is quite exquisite, so small and so intense. She works with pigment, seediac, traditional gesso on wood and Eddie Jones’s paints landscapes in layered similar tonal colours. They are very arresting.

London 23 - National Portrait Gallery

Fanny Trollope 1780-1863 - Auguste Hervieu. Advocate of civil rights

Chantal Joffe ('Self Portrait with Esme') 2008

It was such a delight to be able to go back to the National Portrait Gallery this summer. It felt much more accessible and less constrained than before. Tracy Emin’s 45 portraits of women now cover the front doors addressing the galleries historically poor representation of female artists. This is rebalancing is reflected inside too where in the 20th and 21st century galleries women now make up 48% of the rehung works. They can still do better.

London 23 - Turps Banana 23

Mary Mackenallen

Jeremy Scott

London 23 - Anselm Kiefer - Finnegans Wake

Finnegan’s Wake is a homage to James Joyce and to history’s cycles of rise and falls. It was an immersive exhibition of vast concrete and metal ruins, unstable structures, toys, books intermingled with twisted rusted metal. Born in 1945 into Germany at the end of the war his work reflects this own history . It is overpowering and I felt I could not do it justice in the time I had, I should have returned. It reminded me of Mike Nelson

Sommarlek 23 - Peckham Levels

Xingxin

Green - Zhen Yang

Ramah

London 23 - Isaac Julien 23

I find myself annoyingly wanting to write ‘tour de force’ to describe this exhibition too, but this exhilarating exhibition really warrants this description. Described as ‘sonic tapestries that are politically charged’ you are enveloped in this theatre of sound and image, each display discreetly separated allowing you to move from one screen area to the next, feeling slightly discombobulated and confused as to whether you will ever find your way out again. Isaac’s poetic work is politically potent and draws from a spectrum of artistic disciplines from film, dance, music, painting and theatre.

Galleries since leaving camberwell

Film

I love film and I could reference so many which have impacted me, but I chose these two because they chimed so powerfully with my research and my interests.

A Woman Under the Influence

John Cassavetes’s storytelling requires your close attention throughout this film. The basic narrative is straightforward. It is a hyper-realistic portrait of a woman who, for reasons we cannot fully understand, is disappearing into madness. But the film structure is a theatre of more than her disintegration, it is about the family and what is expected of women, her husband and the home that is supposed to root her to the earth. Nick her husband clings to the memories of his past happiness which blinds him to the present and like Lear, he rages into the storm. . The family demand Gena Rowlands to ‘just be yourself’, but that’s indefinable for what they mean is the opposite. They want her to be the self that works for them.

Cassavetes uses the home as a space to explore this battle between the private and the public sphere and where women sit in this space, with the staircase acting as a focal point in the domestic drama.

.Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Chantal Akerman’s film ‘Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was voted ‘the greatest film of all time’ by Sight and Sound in 2022. Three and half hours long, just as in ‘Woman under the Influence’ the film charts a woman’s disintegration over a period of three days. We observe her as she performs her role as housewife, mother and prostitute of three men, each who has their own allotted time. Each has a part of her, but what makes it so extraordinary is that this is visualised and made apparent through recording her day-to-day domestic duties; everything is obsessively orderly and composed.

As Laura Mulvey says, ‘Akerman transforms cinema itself so often an instrument of women’s oppression into a liberating force.’ (Mulvey, L 2022) Akerman takes domestic work, something unacknowledged and invisible and puts it centre stage. As you watch the film unfold, you become aware of small slippages, a loss of composure, a failure to quite perform her routines and to the occasional exposure of her emotions, which leads us to the explosive, shocking finale.

Literature - Audio and read

“Woman have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size’ p35

Until a few weeks ago I had not read ‘A Room of One’s Own’ - and I find I am astonished by this and I am questioning why. It is a book to read again and again, a work of literary criticism and a feminist tome despite it only being 110 pages.

Essentially Woolf argues that every woman deserves and needs an income and a space of her own, but in making her argument she manages to weave into this storytelling and humour. She draws our attention to not just the social constraints women were experiencing in 1929, but also how they were materially deprived too. She demonstrates how this deprivation prevents women from gaining experience, from getting an education because they live in this England which she says ‘is under the rule of a patriarchy’ . It still is.

Carmen Maria Machado’s experimental memoir of her experience of same-sex abuse. It is an attempt to try and construct a framework, to invent and build an archive when the language is missing. I look to explore this text further in my critical reflection.

Museums

The Foundling Museum

My feelings about the Foundling Museum are mixed. Of course, how could I not be emotionally affected by the stories of the foundlings and of the remarkable man, Thomas Coram. It is an insight into a transitional period in English history, into the social conditions of single mothers, attitudes to the poor and the discrepancies in wealth and privilege of the time. The tokens are emotionally charged and instantly relatable, they allow you a way into the feelings of those women who had to abandon their babies to fate. Time doesn’t alter that emotional bond. The museum is dynamic and renowned, showing well-known, recognised contemporary artists in special exhibitions. While I was there they were displaying work on motherhood and artists included Carol Walker and Chantel Joffe.

What I struggle with is the underbelly of their story. Historically I can understand that a 12-year-old’s life experience in Georgian England is not what I would expect or hope for a child of a similar age today and I feel comfortable in that understanding. I feel that much was done to protect children from what was seen as the danger of the streets, crime and prostitution. They were taught to be docile and obedient; they were found work. The trustees responded where they could when it was found that children were being abused after they left the home and they make clear that they would have prosecuted Thomas Day had they realised what his plans where. However, it is the documented later history of children who were still being sent there up until 1955 that you begin to read and hear about children's ill-treatment and experience of deprivation, shaming and humiliation that leave me feeling more than uncomfortable.

Continued :

It is hard for a charity which needs to receive donations, to maintain its incredible art collection and to continue its work with young people, to address their darker past. This takes me directly to Thomas Day. Yes, he was a man of great wealth and social standing from quite another period in history, but he abducted two children, and he is merely described as ‘problematic’, an eccentric. This doesn’t cut it; he groomed children, he displaced them, he took away their names, and their identities and he physically and emotionally hurt them. I cannot come to terms with this, it enrages me. It is the historical equivalent of ignoring Jimmy Saville or Jeffrey Einstein. The description of Thomas makes him sound almost charming and interesting. The eccentric figure often being used to describe the intellectual, the artist and those with wealth. I know this is a huge ongoing debate and it includes discussion about Gauguin, Picasso and Eric Gill to name but a few, but it needs to be addressed. I just wanted to snatch Sabrina Sidney, alias Manima Butler, and Alias Ann Kingston away from her place in history which is just as an adjunct to another, and shout you mattered and I see you.

Museums

Museum of the Home

Visiting the home galleries allowed me to explore further the concept of home as a physical space by looking at the lives and everyday experiences of those who had lived in the UK over the last 400 years, but also to the feelings around what ‘home’. means. Of particular interest to me was the investigation into the role of largely gendered labour in the private domain of the home. The victorian idea of a woman’s place still endures in the language of today.

Artists

joseph Yaeger - cropped paintings of hands, mouths and feet, but the main focus is on the eyes and seeing. Paintings are cinematic and he uses mediated image. “There has to be this reanimation of a necessarily dead thing,” Yaeger said.

Robin Megannity - cropped paintings, dark and unnerving. Figures. Lush

Elizabeth Saskia Langley - cropped paintings, denouncing traditional memories of childhood. Autobiographical in her own words ‘she extinguishes the candle on customarily happy memories

Michelle Vaughan presents forty notable conservative women. Displayed truncated at the neck like ‘a hunting trophy’. she has turned their toxic views into posters to accompany their pretty pastel pictures

Final Details Form

In my Video essay I will explore the stories of histories eclipsed wives. Documenting how using feminist historiography and storytelling within my practice can make these absent lives visible and awaken an understanding of alternative histories.

Research Festival Proposal Form

I plan to present the content of my proposed research as a podcast or video essay to be published in the online journal. Using my own family archive, I began my MA exploring, through painting, the marriage contract as principally a gendered political experience that defines the subterranean industry of domestic, wifely labour as unremarkable and as simply not there, thus rendering women invisible.

Subsequently, I have expanded my research to explore the wider context of the many forgotten wives of supposedly ‘great men’; from Sabrina Sidney the victim of a grotesque social experiment to create the ‘perfect wife’ and whose life became the blueprint for Shaw’s romanticised play ‘Pygmalion’ and the film ‘Pretty Woman, to the tragic lives of Catherine Dickens and Rose Beuret. Historically wives have been seen as. invisible marginal characters, absent from the archival material or have only been recorded under their husbands' histories.

By presenting this research, through my painting and through the written word I want to open up the conversation and to make visible these neglected wives. To acknowledge their intellectual and creative sacrifices, their domestic servitude without which so many of these ‘Great men’ might not have succeeded at all. I believe the historical undervaluing of female labour is equally relevant today in the debates about gender inequalities and women’s domestic burdens, as they are still unseen and undervalued.