Precious: Paula Rego and Siobhan Wall, New Hall Art Collection June 5th-July 3rd

Precious


Free samples of Natracare tampax and female genital mutilation. For an exhibition in an all girls college within the second largest collection of contemporary women's artwork in the world, the combination of polemic and promotion is awkwardly comic. All ironies aside, this is one of the most exciting exhibitions I have seen at the New Hall Art Collection. Paula Rego, powerful feminist dialogue, political intent...This is the kind of exhibition New Hall should be stripping its grey brick walls for, and which commands a visit.

'Precious has been organised to raise awareness about sexual violence against girls, in particular the widespread practice of female genital mutilation in countries like Ethiopia where WOMANKIND worldwide is active in trying to eliminate this harmful traditional practice...After watching a documentary about FGM, Paula Rego was so affected by what she saw, she produced the series of etchings in this exhibition. A few yeards earlier, Siobhan Wall travelled to Mali and learnt that FGM is still widely practiced in the country...she decided to raise funds for organisations that support attempts to end this traumatic practice.'

Siobhan Wall's paintings are small portraits of African women. They remind me of art therapy projects from communities of silenced women in Africa and of Chris Ofili's watercolours of diversity. They have an understated but powerfully resonant voiec. They remind us of the reality at the root of Rego's elaborated grand narratives. This is the major fault of the exhibition; the disproportionate nature of Rego's etchings and Wall's paintings, only exacerbated by their display on alternate walls. Wall's work needs the cavernous space of pointed silence. Rego's etchings clamour with indignation, they fill all available space, they rupture all silence. I find myself ignoring Wall.

Rego's narrative is etched with a painfully beautiful skill. The legacy of her 'Nursery Rhymes' mean that all her etchings appear to me to be fabulous, fable-like, a complex work of visual storytelling. This is the comfort, the richness of ink, that makes the reality all the more difficult to bear. Rego has created a villain of FGM; starved of voluptuous feminity, wrinkled gourds for breasts, gnashing teeth for a vagina, a living corpse. She is the bogeyman of little girls' nightmares. But worse than this, this is a purposefully female narrative. It is women who perpetrate and perpetuate and perform abuse. Grandmothers, Nannys, Mothers all lead the little girls to their mutilation, restraining and holding their hands over mouths as the little girl's legs are spread, because 'Mother Loves You'. There is no patriarchy or misogyny, none of the expected and accepted forms of oppression.

Any exhibition here is going to suffer from the limits of the exhibition space; the light from fountain court flashes across the picture frames, I have to dance and dodge about to admire the rich depth of Rego's etchings and aquatints, and there is little opportunity to step back and survey in an exhibition which demands our consideration. Stark and sparse; such a bold curatorial statement extrapolates beyond the limits of the narrow corridor.

When I first came to the college it was Rego's etching 'Encampment' locked away in the Fellow's Drawing room that I sought out and coveted as the treasure of the collection. The steely stars glimmer in the sky above, stories are told in the shadows, and fires quietly illuminate the surreal camp of dancing animals and children. Why didn't the New Hall Art collection have more of Rego, I wondered. This exhibition is the one I have waited for, for three years.

Dung Beetles

Three Dung Beetles- Wendy Taylor

Today I went down to the staircase to try and get a photograph of our legendary beetle sculpture in college. However, following what has become a brutal tradition of vandalism, the beetles have been temporarily removed. The Three Dung Beetles are an iconic piece of sculpture in the New Hall art collection, as the borrowed photograph shows their importance lies in their interaction with similarly iconic surroundings. The beetles dance in odd circles as the concrete staircase sweeps around them. It is this drama of architecture and sculpture which keeps the beetles here, despite the many drunken attempts to drive them out. A pattern of tricks is emerging. Students playing with the mischievous quality of the beetles throw them on to their heavy bronze backs and rearrange them in all kinds of positions. So for now the beetles, which are very much a part of our college, have been taken away from us. As a justified punishment for our lack of respect, and our inability to protect them from inebriated men (yes I am going to blame the men). But I hope they will return, as they always do, with their resilient thick, bronze skins.

Grey Bricks and Aquatints

As you may already know I happen to live in an art collection, hence the quotidian exposure to art. When I returned as a resident this year I was excited to find that the curator had found a space for our print collection along the grey brick walls of the residential corridors. The grey bricks are the subject of obsessions; love or hate they are a listed and therefore a permanent feature. As an atmospheric backdrop for the prints of the New Hall Art Collection I think they work very well, 'Grey Bricks and Aquatints' has a kind of poetry to it. Anyway when I return from doing laundry I make a point of travelling along the first floor so that I can see our prints, finally exhibited.

Liliane Lijin, Black Koran, Etching

Helen Fay, Cormorant, Drypoint

Pale reflections in the glass of picture frames reveal the ghosts of bedroom and bathroom doors. As much as Helen Fay's Cormorant desires its creative independence the life of the world around it influences and corrupts. There is something complimentary in the subtle tones of brick and the inky black and white of these prints.

Iona Montgomery, Aranda, lithograph

A walk along the corridor is an exploration in printing techniques; Lithographs, Etchings, Drypoint, Monoprint, and Screenprints. As these women represent themselves they also represent the breadth of their medium. I won't go in to a description of the various techniques here as that is the job of Wikipedia.

The pictures below will offer an insight in to the range of prints on display from wistful fairy tales, to bright dream-scapes and dark brooding landscapes.

Charlotte Hodes, Untitled, Etching

Jacqueline Moon, Lighthouse Tower, Etching

Ashley Cook, Finding your place in the world, Screenprint

Sarah Wilson, Nightgown, Monoprint

We also have one of Paula Rego's Nursery Rhyme etchings, but that's locked away in another room and is for another story.

Ascending form

Not everybody lives within the second largest collection of contemporary women's art work in the world. However I am lucky enough to say that this is the case. Art adorns the walls of the dining room, the bar and the corridors which track the path to our bedrooms. But it is the sculptures which have become landmarks in the gardens which are my interest today.

http://www-art.newhall.cam.ac.uk/

Sculpture, more than other arts has the power to adapt to its surroundings and to communicate with its environment. With the garden coated in fresh inches of snow we are reminded of sculpture's adaptability. Barbara Hepworth's Ascending Form holds the garden in its magical orbit, it is the focal point of all views, the silent observer of snow dancers and sun bathers.

Hepworth made many upright forms based on the idea of the figure in the landscape. Ascending Form has the grace of the anonymous female silhouette with its large human eye. It also draws us beyond the woman, through the hole of its view finder and in to the landscape.

In the snow it transforms again. The snow highlights, it clings to form and depth drawing our attention to details lost through frequent viewing. In the snow I look out of my kitchen window at the solitary Ascending Form and remember how beautiful I think it is.

"my approach to bronze isn't a modeller's approach. I like to create the armature of a bronze as if I'm building a boat and then putting the plaster on is like covering the bones with skin and muscles. But I build it up so that I can cut it. I like to carve the hard plaster surface" (in conversation with Alan Bowness 1971).

Reasons to stay in Cambridge over the holidays...

Almost everybody has gone home, I am still here... My Director of Studies wants to know if I have a family that loves me? I do, but I live in a small village with no car. If I get on my bicycle at home I can cycle for miles and see nothing but fields, if I get on my bicycle here the possibilities increase.

On December 14th a small exhibition called Afterlife will begin at the Fitzwilliam museum with recent prints by Jake and Dinos Chapman, Paul Coldwell, Mat Collishaw, Jane Dixon, Paul Morrison, Hughie O'Donoghue and Marc Quinn.

Mat Collishaw, Insecticide, photogravure printed in colour.

This tantalising image of a butterfly wing is enough to convince me that Afterlife will quench my thirst for exploring modern printmaking. The website says that Afterlife will touch on 'themes of mortality, preservation and regeneration' but will also engage in a dialogue about the use of the print process to 'transfigure and recycle elements of art and nature.' I think it sounds breathtaking. It will probably fill me with the usual longing to take a print making course and spend the rest of my life in workshops etching, screen printing and making printing blocks!

http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/whatson/exhibitions/article.html?2676

The second brilliant thing is an exhibition coming to the New Hall art Collection on the 12th December; The Light Turned flimsy, Tower Tribe Project 3. This exhibition looks genuinely surreal but nevertheless exciting. This is a group of paintings which 'depict warrior/conjuror characters that belong to a tribe who are at the moment loosely called the Tower Tribe.' They are an invented tribe searching for a 'stabilising monument' in their art. It all seems a bit sci-fi, but the paintings look technically brilliant, so I will hold my judgement for the moment.

http://www-art.newhall.cam.ac.uk/exhibitions/forthcoming.html

The Rot of Rhythm, Jan Crombie

So this is what I will be filling my holiday with, look out for more on these exhibitions.

The View from Invigilating

Leaves on the water, my view


Glimpse of the library


The empty corridor


My little table; essay in progress, complimentary coffee

We had 11 visitors in total, things are indeed picking up. I will continue to bully friends in to coming down, it seems reasonably effective!

Tales from invigilation

Today we have had 5 visitors already and I have only been here an hour, although they aren't all here specifically for the exhibition. If people using the corridor walk by, take note of the art, pause to make a comment to a friend or supervisor, then I count them as visitors too.
Watching people's reaction to the exhibition is funny and I enjoy being privy to the giggles of a couple as they make their way down the corridor, the shocked gasps of students as they notice Tracey Emin's monoprints of a woman masturbating and the cheeky passing comment of an academic, 'At least it's better than last time!'. At first I would have agreed that part 2 was less controversial than the politically violent Part 1, but the curator of the exhibition, Phillipa Found reminded me that there had been certain restrictions on which works they could use to advertise the show and plenty of protests as it was being put up. Sex and Violence. I suppose the truth is they are both equally taboo...

More on Flux!

A relatively small number of exciting and internationally consequential things happen in Cambridge, least of all in the college where I live, Murray Edwards. But The Body in Women's Art Now, Part 2 Flux
is one of them and it deserves recognition. Our austere (and extremely cold) exhibition corridor somehow has the gravitas to make an exhibition which attempts to display, alongside an art historical and academic dialogue, the work of modern female artists.



Today I invigilated the exhibition and sat with four monoprints of Tracey Emin and a beautiful expressionistic Cecily Brown in my company. All of this just five minutes away from my bedroom. I counted three visitors this afternoon, that certainly doesn't do the exhibition justice and I hope the numbers will pick up.


A close up of Cecily Brown's work

The Body In Women's Art Now: Part 2 Flux

I am lucky enough to live in Murray Edwards college where I am surrounded by demanding and significant works of contemporary art by women. Art lines the corridors, fills the dining hall, marks the way to the library and announces my return to college. I live in an art space where inevitably these works colour my daily life. This is why an exhibition like Flux causes so much controversy amongst the residents; however monumental or important this exhibition may be in the dialogue about contemporary womens art, we have to live with it for the next three weeks. The temporary exhibitions corridor is also where students wait for their supervisions and we have to wonder whether the images they are faced with might encroach upon their academic dialogue and thinking.


Still from Djurberg's video The Mother

In this exhibition actually, there is one artist's work which forces me to question its inclusion. Last year Sigalit Landau's video, barbed hula made me flinch with its haunting presence at the end of the tunneled corridor, but I couldn't deny that this reaction was what imbued the work with its power. This year my aversion to the claymation video work of Nathalie Djurberg cannot be so easily reconciled with my ideas about Art. As a clay female rapes a man by using his nose to penetrate herself, I struggle to see what this gratuitous violence constitutes in terms of feminist argument. The fact that it all happens in clay doesn't help matters either. It is still uncomfortably explicit. I'm not sure what my horror is supposed to mean or do?



I will post more soon about the enormous merits and successes of this exhibition.