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.

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.

I LOVE Paula Rego

Here's a little tribute!

These are some sketches in biro that I did a fairly long time ago now of some of Paula Rego's work. If you know anything about modern art you will have heard of Rego, her work is powerful and bold, so that modern women painter's must all struggle in her emasculating shadow. She recently had a show in London called The Oratorio (I wrote a short post about it in July), but I still hold out hope that she will be back for a retrospective exhibition at some point. I would love to see all her work, which I spent so much time with during A-levels, in the flesh.

Looking at these sketches makes me really miss drawing, I wonder when I will get the chance to do my own art again or if I am destined to just spend my life with other people's (not that this is a terrible thought at all!)

Paula Rego: The Oratorio, Marlborough Fine Art, London (7th july-20th August)

Just as it is difficult to write a review of something you know absolutely nothing about, so it is a challenge to write about something you are passionate about. I will attempt to resist the urge to gush about Paula Rego. After years of flicking through her books with a gasp for every page, for every reproduced print or painting this was my first time seeing her work in the flesh. And there is so much flesh about Rego's work that it calls to be seen first hand in a small gallery space where there is no possibility of averting the eye or flicking past the page.

Another Rego fan who asks me to take a picture of him and his nephew in front of the Oratorio, the crowning Triptych of the exhibition, says 'Paula doesn't shy away from anything.' but in this exhibition I feel this more than ever. Familiar elements of Rego's work can be glimpsed but the nightmarish undertones have taken over, so that the grotesque figure of the deformed midwife, the woman with wrinkled gourds for breasts who performs the circumcision, are no longer the nightmare in the background but the reality in the foreground.

Rego's work is still folkloric, timeless and placeless but the issues it has swallowed and spat out are not. Female circumcision and abandoned babies, rape and oppression.