Monthly Archives: August 2008

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Whilst reading this month's Art World, I noticed that two of the artists I was most taken with were both shown by the Kate MacGarry gallery in London. It turns out that the gallery has quite an interesting roster of artists, including several who use fabric in a fine art context, which is always good to see. However, the artist I am most impressed with (and the reason I bought Art World magazine in the first place) is Matt Bryans, a London based artist who works with simple everyday materials like newsprint and aluminium foil.


Matt Bryans: Untitled 2006, erased newspaper cuttings.
Unknown photographer

I wish I'd made these incredible erased newspaper works. Bryans collects discarded newspapers, cuts out the photos and then partially erases them. The combination of the act of physically erasing - a process that's been interesting me for a while now - with the intrinsically ephemeral nature of newspapers on their daily journey into oblivion is very seductive to me. I love the idea of taking paper that is already thin and cheap and making it even more fragile by rubbing away at it. A bit of an art conservationist's nightmare, of course, since woodpulp newspapers are notoriously weak and filled with acid but how wonderful that the results are these visually strong, hauntingly strange and eerily poetic works.


Matt Bryans: Untitled 2008, erased newspaper cuttings.
Image by Oak Taylor Smith


Matt Bryans: Untitled 2004, erased newspaper cuttings.
Unknown photographer

Looking at them, I was reminded of the cultural violence of the Reformation which destroyed so much Catholic art in Britain and remains a huge scar across British art history. It's not unusual to visit churches and find empty plinths where statues of saints once stood or sculptures and paintings where faces have been scratched or chiselled out or painted over.

Bryans is clearly a very process-based artist - his huge rolled ball of aluminium involved four people rolling a massive 27km of foil for 8 days, apparently it was quite difficult to stop it forming a square. I love the absurdity of taking metal that has been deliberately made into thin sheets and then reforming it into a large, heavy solid object by hand. Of course, he could have melted and then cast the aluminium foil into a perfect sphere but it's the laborious hand rolling aspect that really makes this work for me.


Matt Bryans: Untitled 2008, aluminium foil.
Image by Oak Taylor Smith

His smaller aluminium wall works were made by rolling foil into balls, melting them and then hitting them with a hammer to flatten them before soldering the hundreds of resulting "fragile but surprisingly heavy" circles to the wall.


Matt Bryans: Untitled 2008, aluminium foil.
Image by Oak Taylor Smith

He's showing at Kate MacGarry from 17th October to 23rd November, I shall have to make an effort to get over to London to see it.

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Last week was awash with celebrations - a birthday, an anniversary, a day out, a tie-dye party and BBQ and a good friend staying for the weekend. Between all that and the inevitable exhaustion, I had no time or energy for blogging but I've been itching to tell you about the day out.

Last Tuesday, for my partner's birthday, we visited the gorgeous Virtuous Well over in Trellech.

Kirsty Hall, photograph of The Virtuous Well, Trellech
Kirsty Hall: The Virtuous Well, August 2008

Once one of the major towns in medieval Wales, Trellech is now a small but archaelogically fascinating village about a 45 minute drive from us. We'd discovered the well quite by accident the previous week after a visit to Tintern Abbey and we decided to go back with a picnic because we'd fallen in love with the place and we wanted to find the standing stones that had eluded us the week before.

The Virtuous Well or St Anne's Well is a Christianised well almost certainly built over a Celtic sacred spring. It's a lovely place; it's in a field just off a country road but it feels about a million miles from anywhere. You can walk down into the well and sit on little stone seats while you soak up the atmosphere. There are little alcoves where you can leave offerings - on the first visit I picked buttercups from the field, this time we brought sweet peas from our garden.

The water contains iron, which may be responsible for its reputed medicinal qualities. The water was thought to be especially good for 'complaints particular to women', which would make sense if the woman in question was anaemic from endless pregnancies and breastfeeding.

Above the well, people have festooned a tree with fabric offerings.

Kirsty Hall, photograph of fabric offerings at The Virtuous Well, Trellech
Kirsty Hall: Offerings at The Virtuous Well, August 2008

This is a very old British custom: tying pieces of cloth called clooties or clouties onto trees beside sacred wells is believed to have Celtic origins.

Originally people would leave pieces of clothing that had been soaked in the well water in the belief that their ailment would pass from them as the cloth rotted. These days, a more eclectic variety of (mostly) fabric offerings are left. I noted a plethora of ribbons and strips of torn cloth interspersed with more unusual items including scarves; a pair of underpants; socks; a martial arts belt; a ceramic medallion; hollow blown eggs; a hand-crocheted flower; numerous hair decorations; strings of beads; shoelaces; knotted plastic bags; the remnants of a balloon; bright yellow fruit netting; a Tibetan prayer flag and even a cuddly toy. They were all knotted and tied together in what I felt was a genuine outpouring of decorative and sacred expression.

Kirsty Hall, photograph of fabric offerings at The Virtuous Well, Trellech
Kirsty Hall: Offerings at The Virtuous Well, August 2008

Kirsty Hall, photograph of fabric offerings at The Virtuous Well, Trellech
Kirsty Hall: Offerings at The Virtuous Well, August 2008

Kirsty Hall, photograph of fabric offerings at The Virtuous Well, Trellech
Kirsty Hall: Offerings at The Virtuous Well, August 2008

Kirsty Hall, photograph of fabric offerings at The Virtuous Well, Trellech
Kirsty Hall: Offerings at The Virtuous Well, August 2008

Kirsty Hall, photograph of fabric offerings at The Virtuous Well, Trellech
Kirsty Hall: Offerings at The Virtuous Well, August 2008

I read one review of the well that decried the modern cloutie rags because some of the fabric is man-made. But I loved them all. There's a raw honesty to this sort of spontaneous folk installation that I find very appealing.

While it might be better if people thought ahead and brought biodegradable offerings, I love that people aren't constrained by what might be thought as proper but instead offer the item that they are moved to leave. While many of the offerings have obviously been deliberately chosen, I suspect that many people find the well by accident and leave what they have on them in an instinctive response to the existing offerings. It certainly explains the hair ties and beads.

And really, who cares if it isn't 'authentic'? It's far more important to me that this place is still in ceremonial use. And who gets to define authenticity anyway? Perhaps the person leaving a sock was genuinely trying to heal their foot? Perhaps the grimy, slowly rotting underpants were originally part of a fertility ritual! There was no graffiti on or near the well and there was no rubbish lying around. Everything that had been left had been done so neatly, carefully and reverently. Sure, some of the offerings could be seen as irreverent but the way they were placed suggested that they weren't. Surely authenticity isn't something that's set in stone but is, instead, a reflection of what people actually do.

Should I have gone and removed all the artificial objects from the tree in a futile longing for some sort of sacred or environmental purity? I don't have that right. And I simply don't want to. If folk customs such as leaving rags at wells are not to fade into obscurity then I think we need to accept that they will change and that some people will leave cotton Tibetan prayer flags while others will leave neatly tied plastic bags. And taking the long view, perhaps one day future archaeologists will unearth 'inauthentic' plastic beads and fragments of polyester ribbon that have fallen from the tree and been buried in the earth and they will know that this was once a sacred well. For all its wonderful qualities, cloth made from natural fibres is in pretty short supply in archaeology, especially in somewhere as damp as Britain.

The well, in all its splendidly inauthentic authenticity, is a very special place and one we plan to return to regularly. On our first visit - when we couldn't find the very large, extremely phallic and quite hard to miss Harold's Stones - it really felt as though we were meant to find the well instead. If we'd visited the stones as we'd planned, we wouldn't have had time to visit the well and might never have returned to discover this little gem.

Oh, and one last funny thing - when I was checking on Flickr to see if there were any other photos of the well, the first image to appear on my screen happened to be this photograph of my friend Ally, taken by another friend, Camilla. Having found the well by sheer coincidence in the first place, I laughed and laughed...

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I had so many lovely shots from Rosslyn Chapel that I felt the need to do another post about it.

ON THE GROUND

I like this shot because it clearly shows the three different colours of sandstone - grey, pink and yellow - that Rosslyn Chapel is made from. This piebald effect occurred because the stone used to build the church came from three different local quarries.

Rosslyn Chapel
Kirsty Hall: Rosslyn Chapel, July 2008

One of Rosslyn's famous 'Green Man' carvings nestling in the archway above some eroded greenery. The Green Man is a traditional symbol thought to represent fertility, so it's a bit of a mystery why so many of them ended up being carved into medieval Christian churches - Rosslyn has more than a hundred of them.

Rosslyn Chapel
Kirsty Hall: Rosslyn Chapel, July 2008

It's impossible to tell if this carving was originally a monkey or a human figure that has slipped down the evolutionary tree in the rain!

Rosslyn Chapel
Kirsty Hall: Rosslyn Chapel, July 2008

FROM THE ROOF

As far as I could tell, each spire on the roof was slightly different. Imagine the artistic passion involved in designing so many different spires even though they'd hardly ever be seen up close.

Of course, at the moment visitors can climb up and see them but the original builders wouldn't have expected that. I found myself wondering if the spires were carved by one very driven man or by a group who were competing to see who could come up with the most unusual design?

Rosslyn Chapel
Kirsty Hall: Rosslyn Chapel, July 2008

Sadly the rain has eroded the soft sandstone on the outside of the chapel but much of the original detail can still be seen.

Rosslyn Chapel
Kirsty Hall: Rosslyn Chapel, July 2008

Rosslyn Chapel
Kirsty Hall: Rosslyn Chapel, July 2008

Despite the signs asking them not to, people still seemed compelled to throw money into the gargoyles.

Rosslyn Chapel
Kirsty Hall: Rosslyn Chapel, July 2008

Looking down from the chapel roof onto the ruined Roslin castle. This area had been visited by artists and writers since the 1700's and it was particularly popular with Romantic artists (even Turner painted here); looking at this misty shot, it's easy to see why.

Rosslyn Chapel
Kirsty Hall: Rosslyn Chapel, July 2008

If it had been earlier in the day and a bit drier, I would have taken a walk through the beautiful and historic Roslin Glen. Perhaps next time...

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Tracey Emin: 20 Years at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

Visiting this retrospective was primarily valuable because it confirmed for me that I just don't rate Tracey Emin. When someone's whole shtick is an emotional outpouring, it's a bit of a problem if the viewer doesn't feel anything. I didn't hate the art, I just didn't care about most of it; instead I walked around the exhibition feeling uninvolved and rather bored.

The problem is that Emin's work is so autobiographical that it's like reading someone else's diary or worse, being grabbed by the collar and forced to listen to a drunken rendition of someone else's tedious problems.

I suspect that to be a great artist, you need to transcend the self and tap into something bigger. Emin seems - so far - to be unable to take that leap. I learnt that she loved her gran; that she has a cat; that her dad brings her flowers; that one of her abortions was traumatic; that her bed got messy and that her favourite uncle died in a car crash - but I didn't learn anything new about myself or the human condition. In my opinion, art needs to connect with the viewer, to touch something in them, to resonate, to disturb or to enlighten: apart from one work, Emin's art did none of this for me.

For something that purports to be going deep, her work is remarkably stuck on the surface. I was reading textile pieces that said things like, "I feel so fucking lonely" and thinking, "yeah, we all do sometimes, so what?"

There were a couple of pieces that I responded to, mostly her later work, which suggests that she may be improving. I sort of liked her rickety rollercoaster, the newer white and cream blankets and the little monoprints of birds but even these were nothing to write home about.

That said, I do appreciate the casual and forthright use of stitching on her signature appliquéd blanket pieces. I've always liked the way that Emin uses textiles in such a confident fashion - unlike many other female artists working with stitch (myself included!) she never seems to get hung up on the domestic and feminine history of fabric; she just cracks on and does it with a 'sod anyone who thinks sewing isn't real art' attitude! I am grateful to her for that because I think she makes it easier for the rest of us.


Tracey Emin: Hellter Fucking Skelter

The piece I liked best was a video work from 1995, the well-known, Why I Never Became A Dancer. The story of her early teenage sexuality and how she was punished for it strongly resonated with me. The tattered, grainy images of Margate shot on Super 8 film are very evocative and the ending, where Emin dances her heart out in defiance of those who tormented her, is genuinely filled with hope and joy. There's something more than pure autobiography here and if Emin could access that more often, she might become the talented artist she seems to think she is. But as it stands, it's the only really good piece in the whole retrospective.

For me the major problem is the literalness of Emin's work; if she could take her raw emotions and her autobiographical objects and transform them into something greater than the sum of their parts then it might work. As it is, I'm not sure that what she's doing is even art: most of the time it feels more like art therapy - just an exhibitionist museum to the self. In short, I feel that on leaving an exhibition, my dominant thought should not be, "well hey, at least she has great tits!"

I've always thought that Emin could be good if she could just get the hell over herself. It's interesting to compare her to someone like Louise Bourgeois, who has also extensively and obsessively mined her emotions and her past but to far greater and more lasting effect. I once saw a show of Bourgeois' art at the Serpentine that disturbed me so much that half way through I had to go outside for some fresh air. On the evidence of this show, Emin has a long way to go before she'll have the same effect.

If you want to see it, the exhibition is on at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh until November 9th.

A ROUND UP OF OTHER REVIEWS


Rather damning review from The Times and a slightly more sympathetic one from The Herald.

Emin talking about the work to The Sunday Herald.

Problematic interview with the artist where she comes across as infuriatingly arrogant. This bit made me particularly loopy!

Some people might find an unmade bed studenty and corny. But Emin is absolutely adamant that "taste cannot get mixed up with what's good and what's bad". There is a definite standard. Quality control. But presumably there are great artists out there, undiscovered? "No. They'd have made it if they were any good." I wonder how she can possibly say that. It shows enormous faith in the establishment for someone supposedly so anarchic. "Why would I be anti-establishment when the establishment is so good to me?" she demands.

This is just so monumentally stupid - being good at playing the art world game is NOT the same as being a good artist.

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Well, I've come back from a rather rainy Scotland to a rather rainy Bristol - are we going to get any sort of summer this year, I wonder? I've just been out in the garden between showers to re-stake my tomatoes, which were so battered by the recent winds that one of the bamboo canes had snapped completely. There's still plenty of fruit on my ramshackle three plants although they can't hold a candle to my dad's very impressive crop but then he does have two greenhouses full of them!

Scotland was good fun, despite the rain, and I managed to squeeze in some art stuff between all the family commitments. Unfortunately, despite taking my password with me I couldn't log in to my blog for some reason and had to content myself with taking lots of photos and notes instead.

So here's the edited version of my week:

Last Wednesday, I met Kate from the Needled blog for a delicious lunch at the Fruitmarket gallery. Meeting her was definitely one of the highlights of my trip; she's a fascinating and intelligent woman and two and half hours fairly flew by as we discussed everything under the sun.

On Thursday I visited Rosslyn Chapel (warning: link has music). It's only about 20 miles from my parents' house but I'd never been before.

Rosslyn Chapel
Kirsty Hall: Entrance to Rosslyn Chapel, Aug 2008

It's a stunning medieval church that has been popular for years because of its unusual architecture and disputed Knights Templar associations but interest sky-rocketed after it featured in The Da Vinci Code. Apparently the church used to get about 10,000 visitors a year but got 70,000 visitors in the year the book was published and numbers have remained high since. The Trust that runs the church was initially quite overwhelmed but all the extra visitors mean they can now fund an ambitious conservation programme for this unique and very special building.

Personally I was far more interested in the incredible quality of the ornate carvings than the possibility of the Holy Grail being buried in its crypts! A guide pointed out a lovely little fact to me: the botanical carvings on the outside show the front of leaves, while the carvings on the inside show the backs of leaves - how fantastic is that! Unfortunately you aren't allowed to take photos inside but the outside is almost as highly decorated as the inside and the protective metal structure that keeps rain off the building means that you can climb up to get a closer look at the wonderful flying buttresses, carved spires and large windows.

Photograph by Kirsty Hall of large stained glass window, Rosslyn Chapel
Kirsty Hall: Large stained glass window, Rosslyn Chapel, Aug 2008

Photograph of flying buttresses, Rosslyn Chapel
Kirsty Hall: Flying buttresses, Rosslyn Chapel, Aug 2008

Rosslyn Chapel
Kirsty Hall: Carvings on spires on Rosslyn Chapel, Aug 2008

The thing that struck me most about the church was the sheer confidence of it. To build such an ornate structure in the war-torn and brutish Scotland of the Middle Ages spoke to me of great power, wealth and artistic vision. I don't suppose that quality stone workers have ever come cheap and the building took 40 years to build and is absolutely covered with carvings, both inside and out. It really is a remarkable achievement and if you get the chance to visit, you should.

.......

Sadly most of the galleries in Edinburgh were in a changeover week so I didn't do my usual round of exhibitions but I did manage to see the Tracey Emin retrospective at the Gallery of Modern Art on the Sunday. I'll do a separate review for that because I have a lot to say about it.

Oh, and my son and I saw The Dark Knight, which we both thought was astounding. All the performances are amazing and although it's a fast paced action movie, it also raises a lot of questions about loyalty and the meaning of morality. On reflection, it doesn't completely hold together on certain plot points but it's well worth seeing.