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.

Sunday Selections

Time for Sunday Selections again! It seems that this is all I am getting time for! However, I am making a Sunday trip to see a living hand-press today, so some photos might be in order!

These photographs need to be introduced with a little story. It was approaching 3am on our final night in Craiova, Romania, before our holidays. We were in the smoky depths of Pub's Pub crowned with tequila sombreros, dancing and singing, when a student suggested we might get on their 3.30 train to the beach. In a tequila-fuelled panic we rushed home, packed our bags, woke up our friend and fellow traveller and bought the last standing seats on the train to Costinesti. The train was 11 hours long. Without a seat, tripped over like a piece of luggage in the aisle, our adventure began to seem less and less like a good idea.

But it was worth it, for the story and for the memories. These photographs are from the first night when we went to a big concert on the beach to see some Romanian music stars. That is the longest I may have ever gone without sleep and by the end of the show the strobe lights were lulling me in to a dance-floor-dream. I think the strange abstract catches of light recreate the sense of excited exhaustion. It's a shame that so many arms and heads manage to get in the way of the magic.

Sunday Selections

Here is the ebb and flow of my contributions to Kim's Sunday Selections. I felt particularly inspired by her architectural photographs this week, but got distracted by other things when I was looking through my own photographs. Sometimes the devil is in the detail, see something from slightly off-centre and a new perspective emerges. These photographs reveal the strange focus of a trip to Rome. Strange details found at familiar sights. An odd collection of tourist shots.

From the roof of San Pietro the sculptures signal.

Mussolini's name, partially erased from a monument. Still etched in stone if not in red.

The view from Castello d'Angelo across the city of Rome and the headless bust which oversees it.

The stairs in the Vatican.

Crowds at the Trevi Fountain, observed.

Trumpington War Memorial

It has been too long. I have been getting very slack, or perhaps just busy. The dissertations are winding down but I have been sneaking in a few last field trips as a reluctant goodbye. When the sun appeared in the afternoon on Tuesday I cycled to Trumpington in the manic winds. In this small village is a war memorial designed by Eric Gill.

In full view of the incongruous cars I took a few photos on the dying batteries of my camera as I circled the War Memorial. It turned out to be a longer trek into the suburban backs of Cambridge than I had imagined so I made a careful and ponderous loop of the memorial to justify the trip.

It makes me wonder how many monuments and memorials designed by Eric Gill lie forgotten in the unassuming rural fringes of Britain. I wonder now if I have passed sculpture and carved stone without realising what I was seeing, and, if in the future there will be recognition.

My various pilgrimages to seek out the work of Gill have proved how deeply embedded he is within a not so distant, still influential, British culture. The mark of Gill is there on some subconscious level, a lens through which we view sculpture, inscription, typography and architecture.

Book Design

I should be finishing up my first dissertation but I keep reading and this continually opens up new angles. Over the past few days I have been following up a few ideas about the significance of fully-integrated book design in Jones' poem The Anathemata. Part of my argument is that the physical book of The Anathemata becomes a sign in itself, an object which the reader uses to perform an 'anamnesis' , like the transubstantiation of the Eucharist. It suddenly occurred to me that treating the book as a utile sign in itself has its roots in a far deeper history. Gill and Jones were involved with the private printing presses of Hilary Pepler and Robert Gibbings; The St. Dominic's press at Ditchling and The Golden Cockerel Press. Anyway this has led me down the criss-crossing history paths of further research. This further 'research' mostly involves requesting the most beautiful books from the stacks and absorbing every minute detail of its design. I have been reading about the history of these two presses, feeling the quality of its paper choices beneath my fingertips, seeing carefully selected typefaces which have been handset, and perhaps best of all admiring the specially commissioned wood cuts and engravings which revived a dying art.

Eric Gill, Four Gospels

There are two masterworks I have been studying. The first is Eric Gill's Four Gospels for the Golden Cockerel Press. Gibbings gave Gill the typeface as a framework and the engravings grew from this. As I looked through the pages I could sense the perfected unity which this process of working had produced. The letters are interwoven with the designs, so that story and illustration are an integrated and fluent whole.

I am very tempted to take this page and head my dissertation with it, at the moment I have a simple quotation 'In the beginning was the Word [...] The Word made flesh.' but perhaps this invokes so much more?

It is clear from these pages and excerpts the extent to which Gill was experimenting with typography, layout and the relationship between visual and linguistic arrangements of meaning. This is one of the side effects of my dissertation, that suddenly I have this overwhelming appreciation for typography. Typography which once seemed the most incidental of things has become this vessel of resonant meaning.

I read somewhere that copies of Gill's The Four Gospels now sell for around £5000. This moment in the University Library, touching vellum and hand-pressed paper, is the closest I will ever get to such essential perfection!

For David Jones' masterwork of Book Design I looked to the Chester Play of the Deluge which he produced woodcuts for in 1927 for the Golden Cockerel Press. The collaboration with Robert Gibbings on this project enabled him to take more of an interest in layout and to produce woodblocks of an even greater complexity. The engravings are dark, compact knots of energy. They capture the chaos and power of the biblical story of Noah. My attention was directed towards The Deluge mostly because of a scholar called Thomas Dilworth who writes that Jones's Anathemata takes its spatial structure from an artistic development that Jones made in these same woodcuts.

The Deluge, David Jones

Building the Ark, Jones

After the Deluge, Jones

While I agree with Dilworth's description of the spatial structuring in these woodcuts, the point I want to make about David Jones' and his involvement with book design is something very different. But I'm not going to give anything away in that regard...

This remains as a glimpse in to my afternoon of discovery, I hope you have a feel for something significant and exciting in this.

Sunday Selections

It feels lovely to decide to return to Kim's Sunday Selections even if in England I find myself a little late. This week I have chosen some photographs from a very vivid memory of a walk in China. One evening I went to get fruit and food from the nearby village. It was a short walk away from the school along a road, through emptiness to the eventual buzz of small, local streets. It was so incredibly humid outside that my camera lens, directed at the hazy scene, immediately was coated in a shiny layer of wetness. This short walk became an intrepid adventure and the poor quality of the photographs capture something of the magic of the feeling, the hesitation and curiosity.

Shop front

Passing cart

Street Scene

Shop Front

Grocery store

Mischief

Two months ago I worked at the private view of Lucia Noguiera's exhibition at Kettle's Yard. While serving drinks to Noguiera's beautiful daughter, various essayists, curators and organisers of the exhibition and Cambridge's most cultured crowd I had a few minutes to tour the exhibition. As I left, clutching a copy of the exhibition catalogue, I promised myself that I would return to think about the exhibition properly away from the excitement of the evening. Today I finally followed the promise back to the gallery space of Kettle's Yard.

'My way of thinking is very much from Brazil: my way of picking up objects comes from there too. It is something connected with childhood and also with the Brazilian psyche. Our way of thinking is not as linear as it is in Europe ... In art you obviously have a background in art history that is very rich. We don't have that in Brazil at all ... We just do everything in a very empirical way, even art.'

The gallery has been filled with Mischief now for a long time but the trails of red cord have not lost their sense of play. Noguiera's work asks, what can we do with material? And more pertinently for the current curatorial climate, what can we do with sculpture? As I follow trains of carrier bags, fibres, salvaged furniture and wasted materials the answer continually evades me, disappearing in to a hole in the floorboards or fading in to white wall space. However this is Noguiera's strength. She can lead us on this sculptural dance, this trail of discovery, which leaves cupboard doors ajar and unsettled, but never need offer us that final release. She is the cruel parent who leaves her children hiding in the game of Hide & Seek. Left in the dark alone we begin to doubt our purpose, we forget the point of the game and eventually come out in to the light with only our questions reaffirmed. As Adrian Searle wrote with such precision 'Her work reveals, it does not explain.'

If there was one sculpture which came closest to lucidity, to elucidating, then it was this Untitled sculpture (1989) made from metal, glass lenses and gauze. Through the lens on the left we see nothing more than what is there. In the right lens a deep tunnel has been created, a small glimpse in to the creation of an otherworld. As people view the exhibition they creep up close to the gauze and wire and peer in to this limitless abyss held in the small, round eye of the lens. The two possibilities are juxtaposed; sculpture that means and sculpture that does not. But if we are led towards a clear judgement here how do we apply it to the rest of our experience? The answer is that we can not, there is no one formula for interpretation and comment.

The watercolours were poised in an expert tension with the brutal, barrenness of the sculpture. Bright, fluid shapes performing a dance of a different kind on the walls. Still a search for incidental and intentional forms persists, introducing a new means of mischief and continually stretching the capacity of its audience.