Market Estate Project

Great News! Joe and I have been selected for the Market Estate Project.

http://www.marketestateproject.com

It's a fantastic community art project. Market Estate is a 1960s housing estate (with a lot of social problems) near Caledonian Road. It's being demolished and rebuilt for the community. But before the bulldozers move in they are inviting 50 artists to take over the flats and make a 'creative playground' of the empty flats, facades and public spaces.

Over 350 artists applied and the proposal that Joe (my studio-mate) and I submitted has been selected to the top 50.

We're proposing to make an installation that explores the relationships between colour, memory, danger and notions of home as a response to the particular kind of domestic setting of the building's location and the period in which it was built.

We aim to re-create a 1967 living room, but paint everything in the space (including the walls, floors, ceiling, fixtures & fittings, domestic objects, personal items) with fluorescent yellow paint. Like Denis Severs' House we intend the space to feel as if it is inhabited but the resident has temporarily left the room. There will be mundane objects such as a half-eaten piece of toast for example, and a cup of tea that will signify this presence - all coloured fluorecent yellow.

We've decided to use fluorescent yellow because of the many things it is used to represent in everyday life: safety, danger, authority, rebellion and hope. These themes were prevalent in the 1960s: the hope and safety of utopian housing schemes, the uncertainty and danger of the atomic bomb, the changing form of antiquated authority and the rebellion against authority by young and student movements.

These themes can be seen to resonate with concerns arising once more in today's society as well as the imminent demolition of this building. Furthermore, the colour can be read as a caricature of the nuclear age due to its violent glow. Like the 'space city' architecture of the Market Estate building, nuclear power was supposed to herald harmony and prosperity, instead results yielded unforeseen, sometimes catastrophic, side-effects. It's our aim that the ubiquitiousness and luminosity of the colour will alter the viewer's perceptions of time, space and the formal nature of the objects in the room. We hope the environment will become an uncanny immersive reality.

We hope the work will be reflect a sense of hope and optimism but be unnervingly saturated. We intend to evoke both a nostalgia for the utopian idealism of the 1960s (a paradise lost) but also question whether in the context of the Market Estate it could rather be seen as a promise gone sour.


If anyone has 20L of fluorescent yellow paint they could spare... we'd be very grateful!!

New Studio

I'm hugely pleased to be able to announce that I've finally moved into a studio. It's a brilliant space in The Old Biscuit Factory in Bermondsey.

Bermondsey used to be known as 'Biscuit Town' because of the smell of the biscuits baking and the fact that 4,000 people living here worked in this factory. It was built in 1866 and only closed in 1989. Peek Freane not only invented the humble Bourbon and Garibaldi biscuits here, but in the 1930s (at the height of the 'cocktail age', so they claim) our studio was the birthplace of the mighty Twiglet. No doubt with such an inspiring spirit in the walls great things shall be created here!

I'm sharing a 370 sq ft space with Joe Morris (a fellow painter from Camberwell) and there are 18 other young artists with studios here. It's a beautiful building with high ceilings and big windows. It has roughly put up wall divisions so it feels very communal. The Biscuit Factory are trying to fill our building with arts organisations. So far, our neighbours include: The Royal Court, Shunt, some sculptors and a temporary gallery space. As well as a great cafe (scampi & chips highly recommended), there is a printers on-site and a strong sense of community.

We can't really believe how lucky we are! ACAVA have negotiated an 18-month contract for us and we all moved in 2 weeks ago so have been busy painting walls, moving in furniture and getting to know one another.

If you're interested in visiting, please do get in touch. We love to show people around and we make a mean cuppa tea.

Watch out for details of Open Studios in the New Year.

For information on ACAVA studios see: http://www.acava.org.uk

FROL-IK Masquerave

SHOWPONY have been asked to create a series of artist-designed masks for the FROL-IK (an East London based DJ Collective) Masquerave night on the 20th January 2010, at The Miller in Borough.

My design is based on modernist architecture and 1950s design.

SHOWPONY. Stimulates. Creative. Collaboration.

One of the things I've been working on has been setting up SHOWPONY.

SHOWPONY is an artist-led collective of four female graduates of University of the Arts. Formed in Peckham in September 2009 by Jess Blandford, Grace Schofield, Charlotte Settle and Amy Woodward.

SHOWPONY stimulates creative collaboration. We hunt out creative opportunities to make and showcase contemporary fine art, and stimulate lively critical discussions and interactions.

We believe in building strong creative alliances to support avant-garde art making and pride ourselves on our approachabiltiy, integrity and our get-stuck-in attitude.

We are curating a series of art-related events including: exhibitions, talk nights, art tours and collaborative projects with other creative organisations.

We will also be hosting an emerging artist's community forum on our website.

We've been busy over the last few months. Some of our recent and current projects include:

'Through the eyes of an emerging artist' tours of Frieze Art Fair 2009; mural commission for Marmite Pop-Up Shop; digital collaboration with Id&Ego; Lucky Pages Directory with LuckyPDF; design project with FROL-IK; Cambridge-Peckham Ideas Exchange; 100 books for young artists project.

See SHOWPONY on-line for more details:

http://showponyart.blogspot.com

or follow us on twitter:

http://twitter.com/Showponyart

We're always interested in creating stimulating collaborative projects with other artists or creative organisations. To get in touch with an idea please email us at: showpony.art@gmail.com

2008 Works

This is from a series of paper houses that I made which involved the notion of destruction. The paper houses (based on places I have lived) were painstakingly constructed by hand and then destroyed in a performance on the opening night of an exhibition at Area 10 in April 2008. This series was the beginning of my interest in fragile structures and explored the notion of artistic control, in that I had to let go of my work and allow it to be changed by others. The only 'instruction' the performers were given was to change the structure using the domestic implement they were given. The performance was documented through photographs, and the resulting 'disaster structures' were displayed for the rest of the week-long show.

At this time I also made a film of a paper house being destroyed by commuters on their way home on the tube. You can see it with some of the other films it was screened with at The Ritzy in Brixton, at this YouTube link. My 2 minute film is at 7mins 35 secs into the reel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=en-GB&v=ObXIf1TXVgo

2007 Works

I've been documenting some of my older works. These were made in 2007 using domestic objects (stuffed into tights) to create odd bodily structures - then used as if for life-drawing and paintings. Influenced by Louise Bourgeois and Hans Belmer, this is a series of drawings on paper (some with watercolour), small paintings and large paintings in acrylic on canvas or board.

These were shown in a group show at The Sassoon Gallery as part of the I LOVE PECKHAM Festival 2007.

Lucky Pages

Insert for the LuckyPdf directory as part of the Bricks exhibition at Area 10, Peckham.

http://artlicks.com/events/24/peckham-welcomes-bricks

Re-Framing Show 14 October 2009

Here is a short film about the group show Re-Framing, shown in the office space of Antennae, Percy Street on 14 October 2009.

Artists invited were: Lucy Ash, Jess Blandford, Trish Bould, Hazel Boundy, Alex McKenzie & Kathy Oldridge.

2009 Camberwell Degree Show - Gallery view

These are photographs of my final degree show piece 'Managed Retreat' in-situ in the gallery space.

2009 'Managed Retreat' (Split Screen video installation)

“A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability” (Gaston Bachelard).


This film installation ‘Managed Retreat’, continues my work exploring themes of fragility and structure in the context of notions of home.

The film focuses on a small community called Easton Bavents. Once the most easterly point of England, this stretch of Suffolk coastline is subject to one of the fastest rates of coastal erosion in the country. 14 houses in this small hamlet have been lost to the sea since the war. 14 are left. ‘Managed Retreat’ is the government policy for areas like this, deemed not valuable enough to protect with public funding.

The stories of the residents reflect a range of responses to living on the edge. Some people are resigned to the inevitability of losing their houses; others don’t think it will happen in their lifetime. One old man is fighting to build his own sea defences to take on the encroaching tide.

The film shows across two screens (echoing the fragmented perspectives), and is projected within a beach hut structure. “The hut appears to be the tap-root of the function of inhabiting” wrote Bachelard, and the way in which beach huts are individualized (with names, stripes, balconies & fretwork) reflects our instinct to reproduce idealistic notions of home in even the simplest structures (“architecture without utopia is impossible” said Thomas Demand).

The work seeks to question our assumptions about the stability of structures in our lives, and how we deal with the unpredictable. By drawing attention to a community that is navigating a continually changing boundary, the film challenges notions of stability usually associated with the concept of home. This post-structuralist approach focuses attention on the precariousness and fragility of places that we think of as certain (‘safe as houses’), and encourages the audience to read this as a metaphor for ways in which other structures that surround us may not be as fixed as we like to believe (like capitalism, gender, language, time).

A sense of time, entropy and loss pervades the work, and yet the nature of capturing the landscape and stories on film, is itself an act of preservation. The long (almost still) landscape shots in the work both reflect the passing of time and yet also attempt to fix and hold onto something that is constantly changing, much as landscape painters have always tried to do. The land itself may not be deemed valuable but making a film implies we should consider how to define value.

Whiteread’s dolls houses, Parker’s exploded shed and Emin’s beach hut have all been influential in the way in which they explore the potency of primitive fragile structures. The influence of Tacita Dean can be seen in the attempt to reflect both stillness and movement in relation to time; as can Lindsay Seers’ installations in thinking about the relationship between documentary and narrative; while Anya Gallaccio and Robert Smithson’s themes of entropy and their challenges to notions of preservation reverberate throughout.

Transcript Peter Boggis - a.k.a. King Cnut

21 meters of land disappeared in 36 hours. So you see I couldn’t just sit back and see my family’s land disappear at this rate. I made it quite clear to the council what I was going to do, so they can’t complain that I didn’t warn them. We reached a peak of 128 lorries a day, and by the end of October 2005, after the environmental agency had changed the law to try and stop me from going ahead, I was forced to stop taking in waste material. But by then I had got the job 80% complete, and had 250,000 tonnes of material in, to act as a sacrificial soft sea defense. Yes, 250,000 tonnes. The bank was 1033 meters long, 25 meters base width, and varying from 4 to 8 meters above beach height. And… what shall we say… it was a fun summer to put it in.

Transcript Emily Whalley – Artist

Yes I’m a painter, my studio as you know is right on the cliff. I’ve got this wonderful space, but it’s got a limited life […] I kept speculating how long do I have? 10 to 20 years? So that’s… when did I go there?… about ‘95 I think. So I was well aware it might just go in and that’s why it wasn’t used as something more glamorous. That’s why I’m there - because it would fall in. So it would have been gone by now except for what Boggis did. I’m afraid I was clapping my hands because I have gained at least another 10 years…

Transcript Paul England – Architect & Surveyor

My daughter heard of a house for sale at Easton Bavents and I said you can’t buy anything there Molly, you know they’re all going in the sea. […] But Molly had a calling… [laughs] it sounds poetic. She even has a calling to this day. She just absolutely loves being here. The isolation of it, the remoteness of it, the sound of the waves, the sea, the ever-changing landscape. You see what you have to understand is that when you live on the edge… as perhaps we do… when you live on a cliff top position, and you are facing the sea, that every day you have a different landscape to look at. There’s never one landscape that’s the same. There’s always a different colour, a different texture to the sea: big white waves, there’s rumbling waves that come in and thunder against that hard sea and send spray up into the air…

Transcript Mr Westlake the Farmer – on the cliff path

When I first came here, there was a bungalow here, with a double garage, and some buildings here left over from the war. And I used to drive the combine on the other side of the bungalow, which is hard to believe because it’s a big machine – out over there [points out to sea]. So you can imagine how much has gone just from here. And see where that machine is over on the North Warren, that used to be 40 acres, it’s about 18 now… [sound of geese flying over in background]. It’s not so much land as sand… it’s very light. It all blows. It’s all sand - which isn’t good, not for crops. But we manage to grow barley. As agricultural land it’s very poor it’s classed as grade 3 or something… grade 4… but I’ve always scrapped about getting a bit of barley… I call it scratching sand.

Transcript Morgan the Local Historian - Dunwich museum

Well erosion is going on all along the east coast, right from Northumberland down to Kent. Wherever you’ve got sandy cliffs you get erosion. And of course England is not getting smaller, because the sea takes from one place and dumps it somewhere else. For example if you take this coast it’s a north south drift. What’s lost from Northumberland and Yorkshire a lot of that is built up on the Lincolnshire coast, in the wash or on the top of Norfolk if you know that area. Wells-next-the-sea is now Wells-a-helluva-way from the sea, isn’t it? By a couple of miles.

Transcript Jamie the Fisherman - on the Pier

She told me about my grandfather who was a trawler man and a herring catcher as well, and the first trip he ever did, as a cook, aged ten. He had to go to the Shetland isles for the traditional herring fishery in the summer and when he got there, there was another Lowestoft herring ship moored up and their flag was at half-mast and his captain sent him on board to find out what was going on. And when he got there he said “oh we lost a crewman on the last trip, he got washed away”, and my grandfather said “oh what was his name, I’ll go and tell our skipper”. And the skipper said “his name was Jimmy Oakes, do you know of him?”. And he said “yes, that’s my Dad”. And so his first ever voyage, as a little boy aged ten, he found out his dad had drowned that week.

Transcript Phil & Louise – The owners of a seafront B&B

[Phil]: Spring tide, neap tide. The tide that comes in around the end of October which is a very high tide because the moon’s in the right place and all the rest of it. I mean we’ve had it crashing against the sea wall. You can feel the house shaking.

[Louise]: Yes you can feel it vibrate.

[Phil]: And the sea is crashing against it, and running along the sea wall.

[Louise]: Right along the sea wall. It takes out the beach huts…

[Phil]: Extremely violent. At the north of the pier the beach huts have to be taken off.

[Louise]: Because otherwise they get smashed.

[Phil]: I’ve seen them. One year, in the sixteen years I’ve lived here, I saw they didn’t take them off and there was a high tide, I don’t know if it was a freak thing, but it ripped quite a few of them to pieces. It just smashes things to pieces.

Film: King Cnut

My first film about Easton Bavents. It is intended to give an insight into the place itself, and the 80 year old man who is fighting to hold back the sea.

Managed Retreat

If you keep walking past the pier, ignoring the slot machines, past the deserted boating lake and the cheap beach huts that sit not on the sand but in the carpark, you’ll come to a gate with several hand painted signs that read Private Land, and No Trespassing.

The potholed track leads up to a small collection of houses and farm buildings. In February, it is a rough, windswept territory. Clumps of gorse, hardy sheep and hundreds of rabbits are interspersed with broken sheds and pieces of discarded farm machinery, quietly waiting for a Heath Robinson to give them a new lease of life.

This is Easton Bavents. Once the most easterly point of England, it is suffering from one of the fastest rates of coastal erosion in the country (an average of 4 meters of land lost each year).

Since the war, 14 houses out of 28 have been lost to the sea. There are 14 left.

The Environment Agency have declared this land an area of ‘Managed Retreat’, which means that no tax payers money will be spent on building costly sea defenses. Instead, other more densely populated, more valuable land will be protected, and here the sea may take what it likes.

Thursley, a red brick, 1930s summer house, is the next reluctant sacrifice. It is currently 4 meters from the edge of the cliff. The two matching houses built at the same time but with better sea views, have long since gone over. The council have just issued a demolition order. Since up to 10 meters has been known to disappear on a stormy night, the house is now a danger to the public on the beach below. The owners must therefore pay to demolish the house that has been in their family for 3 generations.

Thursley has already had one stay of execution.

In 2005, Peter Boggis (who’s grandfather bought the land rights of Easton Bavents in 1904), decided to take matters into his own hands. He built a giant earthwork sea defense to protect the cliffs and his family’s land. Using contractors to bring in soil, and compact it using bulldozers on the beach, the 78 year old Peter Boggis built a bank of earth 1033 meters long, 25 meters wide, and 4 meters high all along the length of the Easton Bavents cliffs. He laid down 250,000 tonnes of compacted soil, and at its peak had 128 lorries a day arriving to deliver material.

His battle against the sea, has been echoed by a battle with government for the right to protect this piece of land. Locals in the nearby town objected to the traffic and materials he used. The Council required waste exemption licences and EU planning applications. Peter Boggis just kept building. Environmentalists objected to the impact on fossils that the erosion was revealing, and designated the cliff edge a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Peter Boggis was forced to stop the bulldozers and instead began a protracted legal battle for the right to continue to defend his coast.

In the 3 years since he built his sacrificial soft sea defense the sea has almost entirely worn it away. That’s 25 meters of land that’s been saved because of Peter Boggis’ earthwork. Or 25 meters of waste material washed out to sea. Depending on your perspective. Either way, Thursley gained another 4 years of life.

Easton Bavents isn’t a place I have any formal connection to. But from the moment I walked past those ‘No Trespassing’ notices, I felt there was something rich and strange about the place. There is something awkward about somewhere that has been declared simultaneously a territory not valuable enough to save, and yet also of special scientific interest. Peter and I have met a number of times and each time I find myself in awe of his absolute determination to fight, in every way he can, the advancing waves and the obstacles of bureaucracy.

Easton Bavents is not a pretty place, the houses there are battered and patched up. Everywhere there are edges. Fences half over the cliff. Roads that lead to a sheer drop. Fields that crumble onto the beach mid-acre. But it is home to the people who live there.

Is it a futile endeavour, to try to hold back the sea? Perhaps. But in Peter Boggis’ battle I am reminded of the words of Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Peter Boggis’ methods may be controversial, but perhaps we need people in our societies who fight against what we collectively decide is valuable, and what is not. What is worth preserving, and what is not. People who fight the decision to walk away. People who will not go gently into the night.