Jonathan Baldock talk, St.Ives Dec 2018

Jonathan Baldock gave a talk at Porthmeor studios, St.Ives.

He's a bit manic, maybe nervous, very entertaining. He has worked using salt dough, felt, his work

is 'about the body and a product of the body', he likes to make references to earlier art.

It reminds me of Ellie Thomas making playful soft sculptures at Falmouth.

The pieces look very beautifully made, simplified shapes, clean lines and very attractive colours

such as those of sugared almonds. He acknowledges that his mother helped him make some.

He has been working in Rome, and in China. He wants an emotive effect on the viewer, maybe

participation, use of smells, collaborations, performance, use of masks, the 'mouth of truth'

like the one in one of the motorway service stations that gives you a prediction of your future and

goes back to Roman Empire times.

It's a good talk because I find all sorts of ideas flying through my head and have to make a few

notes in case they fly out again.

He makes corn dolly masks, a huge pink candle. Large installations.

He has a big show coming up in Camden Arts Centre next year.

He gives out a lovely sense of permission to try anything.

Everyone is hungry by the end, waiting for the delicious buffet that follows.

I find Jonathan and ask him how much time he spends applying for career opportunities and he

says a lot less than his making time, but now he has opportunities offered. His work is known, the

advantage of showing in London with a footfall of some influential people.

He still hasn't eaten, too busy talking to interested people and goes off to find something now.

I give the disco a miss, feeling 17 again, everyone standing around not dancing until later, and walk

home through driving rain past the beach with wild waves, up the hill, still full of ideas and really

appreciating hearing about Jonathan Baldock's.

Two Shows and questions.

Two art exhibitions: raising questions.

Recently in St.Ives, Cornwall, I saw two exhibitions. One was of unusual quilts made by Louise

Donovan, staged in the large Crypt gallery with rent paid to the St.Ives Society who exhibit above

in the Mariners' church. The other was work by the deceased Anthony Green, put together by his

descendants as a pop up exhibition in an empty shop, also paying rent and I believe commission

on sales.

This is the way many artists show their work now. Established art dealers are slow to take on new

artists beyond their tried and tested stables and no longer ever buy work from the artist like those

renowned dealers did in Paris, thereby supporting the Impressionists. The art societies charge to

submit works as do competitions and then also take commission on sales. Commission is usually

40to 50%.

Louise Donovan's works are hand quilted with the stitches going in various patterns, circles,

spirals, undulating rows etc. I was interested to learn that the coloured shapes are first stitched into

an abstract design usually worked out first but sometimes evolving spontaneously.

The most unusual aspect of these quilts is that the motivation is sometimes a response to a

personal experience such as visiting Patmos

or to feeling grief following her father's death

but

sometimes motivated by political outrage. Thus one quilt was made with the colours responding to

photographs of prisoners clad in orange at Guantanamo Bay,

another from bomb damage photos of Syria.

There is a long history of political quilts such as those made by the Soweto women to tell black

protest narratives in South Africa or by those aiding black slaves to escape in America, However

Louise uses no depiction of people or events so visitors need information to be aware of the

motivating factors. It reminds me of 1980's arguments about whether feminist art was art made by

a feminist or needed feminist content, whether Artists for Peace could paint a pretty landscape or

needed to confront contemporary events.

Annie Albers did weaving to comemorate the tragic loss of Jews in the murder of Nazi holocaust

and these are on show at Tate. Like Louise Donovan's work they are complicated, have been

made with much time and care, they are aesthetically pleasing but sidestep direct comment which

can be grasped without reading the catalogue.

Anthony Green's paintings have been in storage since his death some years ago.This raises the

questions that must occurr to most artists. What happens when you die? Will your husband like

Stanhope Forbes be found burning your canvases? Will a friend race to the tip to rescue pictures

from the widow throwing them out? Will there be an auction or a show? Will the work be left only

online and maybe in local archive centre records? There is no way to control this without fame,

fortune or devoted relatives. If Van Gogh's sister-in-law had not appreciated his work perhaps more

than his art dealer brother Theo who failed to sell more than one painting when Vincent was alive

what a loss to the world that would have been.

I am surprised some entrepreneur does not set up a business to take care that artists at least have

some legacy, some documentation, perhaps a final show and a donation to their local municipal

museum.

How do we assess the work of Green?

I gather from the handout that he was a well known artist in

Devon, active in the artistic community. I can see various influences in his work, changes over time

but the dates are not documented. I like some of it. But I have no context to do more than see it as

the work of an artist like so many, diligent, varied, worthwhile but never likely to enter the canon of

art history, remaining a piece of local culture and its storage being a financial burden to someone

unless they sell it, destroy it or give it away.

Mary Fletcher.

Onya McCausland LANDSCAPES

Onya McCausland LANDSCAPES 

Anima Mundi Gallery, St.Ives 

October 20 to December 8 2018

From outside the show looks minimal..Several yellow ochre and red ochre canvasses with geometric designs, very carefully painted. One or two with organic branched designs. Some overhead plans of sites on the floor.

On the back of the price list are grey small print details about mine sites and water treatment although the why and how are not clear. Prices from £1,600 to £10,600.

The artist is ‘working with the Coal Authority to designate five Mine Water Treatment schemes as living paintings that perform the production of ochre, while generating an income for the local economy and producing high quality pigment for artists.’

The images are hung sparsely and look elegant and people are ecstatic about them in the visitors’ book.

Isabelle Bucklow has written an exhibition essay, to my mind contender for art bullshit of the year at 4 pages of pretentious references to Calvino, to ‘porosity between the raw and the cooked’, Freud, Manzoni, Bataille, Nietsche, Whitman, ‘time is not a container but a component, where all is in process, all is song’.,..’McCausland does not halt at the surface, rather she plunges into the depths of terrain entering into a dialogue with that which the earth provides.’

Anima Mundi takes a swerve into geometric abstraction from its usual slightly gruesome expressionism. Succombing to the St.Ives pervading quiet interior decoration?

Is it all a smugglers’  lantern?

I

Two talks, Lubaina Himid and Nashashibi and Skaer

Lubaina Himid, Turner Prize Winner, talk at Pothmeor Studios, St.Ives Cornwall, 2018

Lubaina Himid speaks well. The moment she began I relaxed into the absolute pleasure of hearing

a well prepared talk by someone who can speak clearly with wit and also was adept at answering

various complicated questions at the end before we milled about with delicious soup provided

afterwards.

Lubaina Himid has taught at the University of Central Lancashire at Preston for a long time and

has been working also as an artist since 1981. Because of this busy life she found her residency at

Tate St.Ives in the 90's, when Mike Tooby was director, very valuable as a space and time for

uninterrupted concentration. She returns to work at Porthmeor studios next Spring and will give

more talks and invite people in to see her work in progress.

Her themes have included slavery, fear and dread, safety and survival, and her media have been

various, including wooden figures and painting on ceramics she found, or on wooden carts or on

drawers.

Inspired by two piece East African clothing called 'tangas', which use text and image, she has

produced work including philosophy and politics and seeking an audience that imaginatively

respond. Often she allows the audience to touch or move elements of the installation. Lubaina

trained as a theatre designer and wants to communicate.

Recently Lubaina was at the Guardian for 3 days, one of the many opportunities now open to her

since winning the Turner prize. She has long collected all the pages of the Guardian that feature

images of black people and she has used them to make work that draws attention to the

unthinkingly insensitive juxtapositions that happen because no one is noticing how the pages work

together.

Lubaina Himid told us that in the past her work was often made for shows in museums, referencing

their collections. Often she considered throwing out works because they were taking up space but

luckily was persuaded to keep them. Now that she is a famous Turner prize winner galleries are

keen to have her shows, allowing greater freedom to work in ways that museums cannot because

they need to be so careful of their objects.

At Folkestone Trienale Lubaina Himid showed 100 life size cut out freestanding figures, each of a

black slave with their real name, their slave name and their circumstances written on them. Visitors

could walk amongst them.

We saw an accompanying slide show of works, often brightly coloured, lively figures, always with

important ideas in the making, with consciousness of dire situations in life, but hopes for people to

work to improve society.

I was very impressed.

Tate St.Ives talk by Nashashibi and Skaer on their exhibition, October 2018

The audience persuaded the organiser that we would rather see the screen images than have light

stream in and that she needed to speak louder.The speakers were introduced by the curator who

said their names so rapidly that I did not get which was which. The speakers had not trained to use

microphones or to be animated and their delivery was tentative and glacier-like.

These two ex Turner nominees work together on projects using other peoples' art to prompt their

responses. I think of this as what Griselda Polock described as 'an avant-garde gambit' and I also

note the trendy a la Tacita Dean use of analogue film, then often translated to digital video.

The artists have the jargon, 'transgression', 'male gaze' etc., they have some ideas, but talking of

symbolic gestures I feel like making one because it's years since I felt so bored and I leave wanting

to scream. I sympathise with the priest at Matisse' Vence chapel who co-operated with them

wearily.

Afterwards I went round the show.

It's an excuse to bring us a lot of interesting paintings from the Tate and elsewhere, Bonnard,

Gauguin, Nash, Sickert, the Lee Miller photo of her in Hitler's bath, etc. The artists have been to

New York to take photos of museum objects at night, to Hongkong to film the ex-British consul and

to Tahiti to shoot where Gauguin painted. They have selected all sorts of art with vague

connections. Their videos are so slow moving that I couldn't watch them through.They have

selected a few  contemporary women artists none of whom are very attention grabbing.

Aaaaarrghhhh!

Monica Sjoo by Rupert White

Monica Sjoo by Rupert White.

This book is a condensed diary for Monica Sjoo, presented after a useful introduction about her life and work's contribution to art, feminism and Godess worship, so that it takes a sort of headlong rush through her life. After a while I really liked this dash through the years as I came across lots of names I knew and events I had been to and the whole era was evoked with all the earnest and

changing enthusiasms of youth. I found I was in 1982 at the demonstration against the US at Greenham 'Embrace the base' in which Monica Sjoo was also participating.

It is clear that Monica Sjoo found her kind of feminist spiritual belief must be linked with political action. She was very keen on ecology, leftwing trends, anti war protest and her own bisexuality.

She put a lot of energy into exhibiting widely and going to speak in several different countries.

Somehow she endured through the grief of the death of two of her three sons when they were quite young, killed one by a car hitting him and one by cancer. She then went onto suffer herself from cancer but went on contributing to events indomitably.

I do not particularly like Monica Sjoo's art in its highly stylised form, strangely similar in some ways  to socialist realism say in Diego Riviera's murals, but with a love of Neolithic monuments and belief that there were pre patriarchal religions that revered goddesses. My own feminism rejects idealising a list of the 'feminine' qualities although the idea that once in Crete images of women were worshipped I find an exciting probability that emphasises the cultural construction of patriarchy that came after.

'God giving birth' was an important work by Sjoo, first shown in St.Ives,1970, often seen as controversial and used many times in various publications. Her book, 'The Great Cosmic Mother' was named by Alice Walker as her favourite work of literature and I now want to take it out to read again.

I found out a lot about Sjoo from Rupert White's researches and I ended up respecting her wide ranging work and realising that it amounts to more than I had thought before.

Abigail Reynolds Lost Libraries talk and Book

Abigail Reynolds:Lost Libraries.
  T

This event was a film and talk at the library in St.Ives as part of the September festival 2018. Abigail Reynolds had won a BMW grant that financed and organised every detail of her proposed trip on the Silk Rd from China to Rome to the sites of 15 lost Libraries.. Part of the deal was also the production of a book which looked very beautiful and can be purchased or borrowed from the library. The film was made using an old 16mm Bolex movie camera and edited to be shown as two simultaneous images, done because the medium of books presents two pages to us. It was 18minutes long and designed to be looped but we viewed it from start to finish. It was rather enigmatic, full of brief romantic glimpses and ranged from her small daughter asking questions to the artist being arrested in Egypt and a shot of her next to the magnificent BMW motorcycle provided for her to ride part of the way.

Abigail then told us more about the project and how her adventurous trips went. I hoped she was recording this because she spoke very well about both the personal aspects of being a woman undertaking the three visits and about the importance of libraries as non commercial public places and the danger of possibly future disintegration and loss of digital media. She chose film deliberately as a physical medium and wanted to actually go to the places to experience them.

The questions from the audience were very interesting although the one referencing the first translation by a woman of an ancient greek work into english was made by a man whose lengthy sideways approach to asking a question verged on giving a talk of his own.

Abigail spoke enthusiastically about the privately endowed large libraries in Americnd I was surprised to hear her attributing the present lack of valuing of uk libraries which are closing down not to the political Conservative government austerity cuts but to the fact that people took for granted what the welfare state had been providing.
I hope there was some understanding that it is politics that drives these cuts and that a Labour government is our hope of maintaining and investing in public facilities for education such as libraries.

 I left before I could raise this as I needed to catch the last bus which was unfortunately at 6 o'clock, another symptom of having to rely on private profit to provide services. I was able to email a query to Abigail. Her reply supports libraries being a public service but still suggests that this prevents private philanthropy saving them, whereas I would say private benefactors would be welcome to donate large sums to preserve them but have not been doing that and that we cannot rely on private benevolence.




' Lost Libraries' by Abigail Reynolds. 2017 This is an interesting book to handle and read. It has been lovingly put together with different textures and colours and layouts and a new technology that allows smartphone users to access soundtracks.

 I have quibbles with a few details, particularly the author's way of referring to Cornwall as England even though living in St.Just she might know many of us consider this inappropriate and although as she travels from country to country she might be sensitised to issues of boundaries and identity.

 However, overall the text and pictures are fascinating , facts, observations and personal feelings given equal parts. There are some lovely original remarks such as likening people queuing to see a cave as like the film going through the gate of the Bolex movie camera that she has chosen to use. This decision seems to be because of film's physical non digital form but makes for difficulties and is a heavy camera whilst also perhaps being an art cred gambit a la Tacita Dean.

Abigail Reynolds acknowledges the strain of travelling alone, needing some contact, someone on her side, and I can hardly imagine her wanting to leave her young children and partner to take on these trips. She was able to include them on part of the Italian researches. Her ambition to achieve the project when her proposal won this huge prize must have been enormous.

 There are many lovely phrases, of her imagining the harem women at Qu'on Palace in Uzbekistan when she sees the museum attendants in a courtyard, 'a sort of sherbet leisure of bright dresses and laughter', and watching the sun set over Tashkent, ' a peach skewering itself on the distant spike of the TV tower'.

There isn't more than a hint of her political views, nothing positive to say about the soviet era or Mao, but the courage to contest the need for women to wear heavy make up to enhance their beauty.

 I enjoyed all the quotes for example Petrarch, 'What has been lost cannot be destroyed or diminished'. I learnt all sorts of things such as that Trajan's column was originally in the centre of a library of several floors so that its narrative could be followed easily. Also that a whole Iibrary, The Villa of Papyri, remains in burnt fragments which we now have the technology to decipher if the Italian government had the will to do this using multi spectral digital imaging.

She deduces from a remark of Augustus that reading was normally aloud not to oneself in the fourth century CE. She asserts that Romans at the time of the eruption at Herculaneum had no word for volcano and no understanding of what it was. I want to question these assertions.

Abigail bothers to credit the help of many people at the end of the book, all in alphabetical order except that Theresa Gleadowe, wife of Nicolas Serota, and very important person in establishing the CAST project for art in Cornwall, is singled out separately.

I would have liked to hear about what is happening to St.Just library and to have the credit for austerities' damages firmly attributed to Conservative government, but Abigail Reynolds is not one to make a clear political statement. One wonders if BMW 's grant prohibits this?

She does however say,'We take for granted the stability of peacetime, the subtleties of freedom. We squander our resources on trivia and, with our attention diverted, allow the things that generations have fought for to slip through our fingers'. Do buy the book or even more appropriately request and borrow it from your library

MA Illustration Falmouth

Falmouth Illustration MA. Sept 2018

This show is now the only surviving MA show at Woodlane as sadly the Contemporary Art, the

Environmental art and the Craft MAs have gone, victims of Tory austerity ?

There were about two dozen artists in 3 studios.

At first I though it looked a bit tame, small scale and quiet colours, but I needed time to adjust and

then found the show varied and absorbing.

Wonderfully generously a free catalogue was provided and everyone had postcards to collect with

their contact details. There were also books to buy but sadly no refreshments or cafe area.

A few people were there taking a great interest. I always feel the college should make a lot more of

the MA show to help the artists and should have the show still up for the new students to see who

are embarking on courses. There were several of the students there available to chat and those I

asked thought it was a good course. It is the refuge of artists that can draw and want to in these

postmodern times.

Unusually there was someone who actually drew Falmouth docks and local beaches with great flair

and fluency.

Georgie Bennett

I liked the way one illustrator, Judith Ohamizo Jurado,  invited us to sit at her desk and examine many small books that took

us into her life including pictures about her mother's death.

Then I was entertained by a political foray using sound, song and charicature to lampoon the way

Jeremy Corbyn has been presented but in an affectionate way.

Kat Johnson

I liked the wooden movable plant forms that knocked together gently.

Sarah Hougham-Slade

There were attractive stories, especially one with an urban and a country fox by Anita Stuart Andrews

There was reference by Valerie Dalton to painful experience of child abuse.

There was something using video about sea swimming.

There was work about the present bombardment of images versus quiet looking at a physical

book.

AND I was delighted to find a booklet of manifesto statements.

So well worth a visit and I left enriched by meeting a number of artists through their works. 

In the past I have heard some tutors at Falmouth disparage illustration, indeed 'illustration' is used as a

term of abuse for people's art on occasion, but why? 

The illustration MA shows us artists finding

their own individual expression in a variety of ways and the fact that they can all draw and can

make a living in the world of books etc is fine with me.

As Danya Todd puts it,

'Explode! Art is not a numbing agent, be volcanic'.

Falmouth Illustration MA. Sept 2018

This show is now the only surviving MA show at Woodlane as sadly the Contemporary Art, the

Environmental art and the Craft MAs have gone, victims of Tory austerity ?

There were about two dozen artists in 3 studios.

At first I though it looked a bit tame, small scale and quiet colours, but I needed time to adjust and

then found the show varied and absorbing.

Wonderfully generously a free catalogue was provided and everyone had postcards to collect with

their contact details. There were also books to buy but sadly no refreshments or cafe area.

A few people were there taking a great interest. I always feel the college should make a lot more of

the MA show to help the artists and should have the show still up for the new students to see who

are embarking on courses. There were several of the students there available to chat and those I

asked thought it was a good course. It is the refuge of artists that can draw and want to in these

postmodern times.

Unusually there was someone who actually drew Falmouth docks and local beaches with great flair

and fluency.

I liked the way one illustrator invited us to sit at her desk and examine many small books that took

us into her life including pictures about her mother's death.

Then I was entertained by a political foray using sound, song and charicature to lampoon the way

Jeremy Corbyn has been presented but in an affectionate way.

I liked the wooden movable plant forms that knocked together gently.

There were attractive stories, especially one with an urban and a country fox.

There was reference to painful experience of child abuse.

There was something using video about sea swimming.

There was work about the present bombardment of images versus quiet looking at a physical

book.

AND I was delighted to find a booklet of manifesto statements.

So well worth a visit and I left enriched by meeting a number of artists through their works. In the

past I have heard some tutors at Falmouth disparage illustration, indeed 'illustration' is used as a

term of abuse for people's art on occasion, but why? The illustration MA shows us artists finding

their own individual expression in a variety of ways and the fact that they can all draw and can

make a living in the world of books etc is fine with me.

As Danya Todd puts it,

'Explode! Art is not a numbing agent, be volcanic

MA Illustration, Falmouth 2018

Falmouth Illustration MA. Sept 2018

This show is now the only surviving MA show at Woodlane as sadly the Contemporary Art, the

Environmental art and the Craft MAs have gone, victims of Tory austerity ?

There were about two dozen artists in 3 studios.

At first I though it looked a bit tame, small scale and quiet colours, but I needed time to adjust and

then found the show varied and absorbing.

Wonderfully generously a free catalogue was provided and everyone had postcards to collect with

their contact details. There were also books to buy but sadly no refreshments or cafe area.

A few people were there taking a great interest. I always feel the college should make a lot more of

the MA show to help the artists and should have the show still up for the new students to see who

are embarking on courses. There were several of the students there available to chat and those I

asked thought it was a good course. It is the refuge of artists that can draw and want to in these

postmodern times.

Unusually there was someone who actually drew Falmouth docks and local beaches with great flair

and fluency.

Georgie Bennett

I liked the way one illustrator, Judith Ohamizo Jurado,  invited us to sit at her desk and examine many small books that took

us into her life including pictures about her mother's death.

Then I was entertained by a political foray using sound, song and charicature to lampoon the way

Jeremy Corbyn has been presented but in an affectionate way.

I liked the wooden movable plant forms that knocked together gently.

There were attractive stories, especially one with an urban and a country fox.

There was reference to painful experience of child abuse.

There was something using video about sea swimming.

There was work about the present bombardment of images versus quiet looking at a physical

book.

AND I was delighted to find a booklet of manifesto statements.

So well worth a visit and I left enriched by meeting a number of artists through their works. In the

past I have heard some tutors at Falmouth disparage illustration, indeed 'illustration' is used as a

term of abuse for people's art on occasion, but why? The illustration MA shows us artists finding

their own individual expression in a variety of ways and the fact that they can all draw and can

make a living in the world of books etc is fine with me.

As Danya Todd puts it,

'Explode! Art is not a numbing agent, be volcanic'.

Rose Wylie on tv and in Penzance and Newlyn.

Watching Alan Yentob talking to Rose Wylie , who at 83 is having sucess as an artist. She is just as I would have imagined, a terribly middle class bohemian, messy, speaking in that perilously well educated quiet way. I am expecting not to find out how she became successful. She has a lot of space and therefore works big. How did she get a show at the Serpentine?

Her drawing is very rough and childlike, no attempt to observe closely, repetitious cliches of pink square heads. She collages on top, writes words on, uses memory.

Germaine Greer speaks well of her. She was married to a painter who has died, and she brought up children, only later going to the Royal college and having time to paint, using unstretched  canvas and working on several pictures at once.

The crude drawing is a bit like Guston? A bit early Hockney?

She says nothing about her relationship with her husband Roy Oxlade.

She wears lipstick and has her hair carefully styled.

So, I can't say I really like Wylie's  work, it's unpleasant, derivative of films without saying anything, it's clumsily faux naive and it's been taken up with ridiculous enthusiasm.

It has a certain vitality but it's tedious, slapdash, self indulgent and Yentob has not asked anything very difficult.

I am of course envious of her sucess. It's rather terribly emperor's new clothes.Must go and see the two local shows of her work so I can speak with more authority about what the pictures are like at firsthand.

X.    X

So, just returned from her two shows at The Exchange in Penzance and at Newlyn.

It's nice to be able to see paintings here that are currently in the art news.

They are big, the unstretched canvas is glued on to stretched canvasses and you can see where the staples were that the artist used to tack the canvas to her wall.

I notice the comment book has many enthusiastic comments about her vision being like a child's, but, but....I want to ask why Wylie likes this faux naivety. I don't like it, the lack of observation, the use of Nazi uniformed figures, the crudity.

One picture with its recall of wartime aeroplanes and dogs below gave me a feeling of Rose using authentic memories but many of the works were not so interesting. 

If they were done smaller by an artist without her connections who would give them gallery space?

If she is to be congratulated on success in the art world purely because she is old isn't that condescending?

I couldn't stand more than two minutes of watching her painting a wobbly blue line but maybe the rest of the over an hour long film about her was more compelling.

How will oil paint on raw canvas survive the ravages of time? 

Does it matter?

 I have a feeling there's only room for one Rose Wylie, that others with her cack handed badly drawn cartoonish figures will not fare so well. 

She's having a ball, enjoying creating images and being courted as if she's the new Basquiat, who she admires, but I suppose it's like marmite, if the taste grates and the novelty isn't impressing you you have to leave it to those that contemplate Wylie's work with relish.

Francis Alys 'The silence of Ani'

Francis Alys 'The silence of Ani'  13 minute HD video installation at Cast , Helston,July 2018

This video is in black and white, more stylish and beautiful than it would have been in colour?

The setting looks deserted and wild, spacious, grasses waving in the wind. There are fragments of masonry, something like a chapel, columns, carved words, an ancient site with no visitors, or only a few young people with bird whistles, making sweet trilling noises of various kinds, approaching and coinciding, falling into a rhythm and then then silence as they are seen lying down. 

Were they remembering some destruction? Were they reenacting deaths?

After a pause we see a drawing of the once large city of Ani, we read that this was a performance to imagine the place with birdsong revived, before a long past destruction. The bird whistle blowers were asked to perform until tired, when they lay down. Alys probably put forward his idea and it was selected by a  Turkish committee.

I was reminded of visits I have made to ancient sites, aware of lost long dead people, of the transience of life. I was enjoying the way the filming was done, the swaying of grass, some blurred shots, the mingling of various trilling sounds, the movement before stillness.

My companion would have liked the explanatory titles at the beginning rather than having been led to speculate but I liked being aware of my reactions before the information came up. I had been expecting more current conflicts to be referenced but instead the message seemed to be a universal one of time passing, civilisations falling, cities ruined but treasured for their ability to evoke history, an idea of people everywhere as fragile, as possessing a common humanity caught in the events around them.

I saw parallels with my favourite work  by Alys to date, the one where many red coated soldiers in London were choreographed to march around in formation, a gentle and fascinating  amusement using the image on many tourist postcards. A performance was made that animated the place and played with notions of empire, anachronistic bear skinned chocolate soldiers, patterns and rhythms and the break up of marching in step on the bridge.

We were lucky to see the video, kindly switched on for us even though I had misread the dates and arrived after this part of Groundwork was finished.

  The Cast building is an appealing old place with some desirably large studios and a pleasant light cafe. It's funded largely  by arts council grants and I suspect hardly any of Helston's inhabitants drop in for coffee or even know it's there just behind the car park near the Godolphin Buiding and very near the Museum. And only 50pence to park for an hour!

I wonder how much the artists meet? Do they? Do the artists in the studios get exhibitions also?

It seems idyllic, space, refreshments and interesting international artists brought in by Theresa  Gleadowe. 

A place worth keeping an eye out for if you want to be one of Cornwall's art cognoscenti.