A Year in My Studio, exhibition at St.Ives Arts Club

  'A year in my studio'

   

  A solo art exhibition at St.Ives Arts Club , Dec 28 to Jan 3rd, 11 - 4 daily, free admission.

Embrace

This is the first year that I have had a studio outside my house. 

It is at White's Old Workshops, Porthmeor Rd.,St.Ives, twenty minutes walk down the hill , past the sea and Tate St.Ives.

There is a group of studios there and the public can drop in to see our work.

When I was at college at Nottingham in the sixties personal space had been abolished, although you could work where you found a temporary space, and when I did my MA in contemporary art, in 2006 at Falmouth, part-timers were given no space there to work in, so perhaps I felt a bit deprived of a personal space, a room of my own as Virginia Woolf said.

At first I began to be influenced by the seascape but I don't think I have become seduced into commercial tourist imagery. I go on as a flaneur drawing people I see , working quickly to capture their movement as they pass. I also draw at performances of music and dance, most  recently of the Moscow City Ballet.

Moscow City Ballet

15 people I saw in the harbour

New this year has been enlarging the original drawings and collaging these onto canvas to keep the spontaneity of them rather than trying to recreate it

I have liked being out in the town, feeling more part of the community of artists, going out to work. I have painted more but done less film - making.  (See Vimeo for examples)

There have been various political themes that I have used. 

Umanets imprisoned in Rothko

I started an online petition to ask for Umanet's two year sentence for scribbling on a Rothko to be altered, and 129 people signed, one of them Katya from Pussy Riot. 

Paintings about this followed, using Rothko-esque rectangles, which then cropped up as windows, relating to a visit to Sitges near Barcelona, and abstract canvasses, which were an experimental surprise.  Then I used this shape again as  grave shapes in the 104 women piece, 'in sorrow and in rage', which I have shown now as a model shrine in memory of the killing of 104 women in 2012 by their partners or ex-partners, inviting people to place a candle, in this case a symbolic one as St.Ives Arts Club is a wooden 

building in which no naked flames are allowed.

Spare room:spare house

The bedroom tax also demanded some response from me and eventually I used the contrast between Van Gogh with his spare room for Gauguin to visit, and our Tory PM, David Cameron with a spare house. It's a sensitive subject here in a seaside town where there are a lot of second homes, empty much of the year and a lot of poor people unable to buy a first home.

Above us only sky 

As a humanist I wanted to also do something about not believing in God and I used some lines from Ono/Lennon as inspiration and figures I had observed either in town or from drawing from tv when they have discussion programmes.

Exhibiting with Taking Space at Helston Museum, I found four people mentioned there from two hundred years ago and made some pictures, copies of which the museum may use in educational work. The most interesting to me is Joseph  Emidy, a freed black slave, who became leader of Truro Philharmonic and wrote music, now sadly lost.

Joseph Emidy

Also a first was getting a ceramic figure cast in resin and iron. I liked this finish better than the bronze.

Dancer

I have exhibited several times in Redwing Gallery shows in Penzance, which specialise in work outside the mainstream. St. Ives is still dominated by what I call 'Penwithy ' abstraction, a lot of atmospheric texture and marks which allude very loosely to the landscape and seascape of Penwith. There aren't many artists here drawing contemporary people or referencing politics or ideas. There is quite a bit of what I find rather flaky symbolism and myth. So I stand out as different.

Eavesdropper

Next?

I want to see Cornwall as a hub for art, not a satellite of London, but I also want to exhibit outside Cornwall.

I have an idea for a sort of humanist tabernacle made in a wigwam, to celebrate creation without believing in a creator and to be a space for reflection.

I have some film clips waiting to be used.

I keep drawing and observing, influenced by feminism, socialism and psychotherapy, and encouraged when some people really respond to my work.

I painted round the corner of this small canvas partly as a joke about the way some artists continue their landscapes round the sides.

5 on the beach

Art needs to be seen or it's like a TV set waiting to be switched on.

   

Camilla contemplates the scope of youth work

Timothy Spall and Whoopi Goldberg at Sennen cove







  



        

Transitions Week Two Newlyn 2013

Transitions November,  Newlyn Gallery, week two. Nov 2013 until 16th

Upstairs Jonty Lees has placed attractively all the way round the beautiful gallery different pieces of wood, some coloured, different sizes and shapes. Visitors are invited to make a sculpture by placing their selections together and he will then take a photo, as the wood will be re-used for other compositions by other people.

He has a video of his small daughter doing this also.

Its tempting and not too taxing for people as there is no mess, and somehow he links this with work he has had at Trelliske on a residency beside Doctors who are seeking to tell us all that being outside in fresh air is good for us. There is a link for Jonty between their ways of looking at data and how variedly the visitors will assemble what they are given to play with.

Its like a much more sophisticated lego but with no joining bits and its very enjoyable.

Downstairs Janet McEwan and Ann Haycock have ‘We are not petrified’, a title I love, which refers to the dancers of Merry Maidens local stone circle fame. They have films of dance, wigs to make you feel different, a poet coming in also, a toy accordion I enjoy having a go on , and a pile of handbags the maidens have put aside while they dance.

There were two delightful 16mm projectors when I was there, so stoutly built and making a lovely sound, and Janet was projecting a loop onto and round a handheld stone which was an unusual idea. and the stone was scraping the emulson off the film.

So again it was very playful and fun and an Ithell Colquhoun [1906-88]

painting of a sort of sexual surrealist kind had been borrowed from Penlee.

Much discussion re technology, why people like film rather than digital, etc.

Two more weeks of Transitions, I hope lots of folk will drop in there.

Excruciating Noise

Doesn’t anyone else mind the excessive mind-numbing sound levels that some dance companies are playing their music at?

I left ‘Some like it hip-hop’ at the interval because the noise level was too loud for me.

This week, ever hopeful, I went to see ‘Freedom’ by the Vardimon company.
The noise level this time was well over my pain threshold and I had to rush out and ask for my money back after sitting with my hands jammed into my ears for a few minutes. 

Disturbingly, I could not exit through two doors labelled ‘fire door’ because they were locked shut.

It looks as if I’ll have to stop going to Hall for Cornwall. My husband also found the noise level far too loud and was glad to leave.
Is everyone else so deaf it doesn’t bother them or too afraid to complain?
Anyway, two wasted drives from St.Ives, car parking, programmes and expensive tickets - I will restrain myself from booking for anything else and hope the Moscow ballet and Rambert dance are as wonderful as usual as I have those tickets already.

Oh yes, and Vardimon had no interval, making the assault on your ears more of an ordeal and depriving Hall for Cornwall of useful refreshment revenue and all the small audience of being able to meet and chat with fellow cognoscenti of the dance circuit.

Hall for Cornwall should issue noise level warnings, ask companies to not be painfully loud, and keep fire exits unlocked.

Sometimes ‘Freedom’ is leaving.

Mary Fletcher.

Nederlands Dance Theatre 2

NDT2     Nederlands dans Theatre   Truro Hall for Cornwall March 2012

‘Gods and Dogs ‘ choreographed by Jiri Kylian

This first dance was fast moving, the performers using strange ungainly attitudes and unusual movements with amazing skill, fitting the melody and rhythms of the Beethoven based soundtrack. There were also unusual additions such as a twitchingcurtain of long strands and a projection of the vivid image of a wolf or dog above the dancers’ heads. I hadn’t the least idea what it was about. I’d decided to watch the whole program and see what I thought before reading the notes, only to find no explanations at all in the notes. It was a great display, received with enthusiasm by Truro’s audience. The screamers were here  in the back row which makes it sound very exciting and I thought the dancers looked almost surprised by the wild enthusiasm.

‘Deja Vu’, Hans van Menen, followed. My companion asked me if we’d seen it before.

The music, by Arvo Part, was again the focus, with dancers often mirroring one another, more fluidly this time.

‘Solo’, also choreographed by van Manan, was the most beautiful of the works, 3 men appearing by turns, each with their own style of movement, dancing closely with the Bach violin suite, and at the end all on stage together. They were all marvellous dancers but Jianhu Wang was my favourite, there was something so infectiously bouyant and easy about his jumps and twizzles.

Lastly came ‘Cacti’ by Alexander Ekman, also danced to lovely classical pieces by Haydn, Beethoven and Mahler. In this the dancers had square plinths to move on and around and to move the positions of, which they did, wittily appearing from behind them so we saw a head or arm etc. They also had cacti of various shapes,which they moved about, the word cacti was used in lights at the sides and a voice made statements about the post modern which also conveyed the pretentiousnous of the art world. Men and women wore similar costumes, very simple as in all the pieces NDT2 danced in this program. The dance was witty and the whole thing was absurd in a lovable, zany way.

As so often in dance I was left very impressed by the level of performance and the number of inventive ideas. In the non dance visual arts there is often so very little to see as if artists have not put in the effort or actually seek to bore the audience.

In dance it is still sufficient to move to music in a way that totally absorbs the audience in a delightful collaboration, a total concentration of audience and performer that leaves me refreshed and invigorated despite my arms aching from applauding. Also I find myself still wanting to wonder about the meanings. I find ideas for ballets as yet unformed are germinating in my mind. There’s a lot choreographers could use, I’d love to colaborate with one, or I might just use the ideas in my paintings.

I’d love to see the other repertoire of NDT2 and hope they visit us again soon.