'We are Floating in Space' Exchange Gallery and Newlyn. 2023

‘We are Floating in Space’. Newlyn and Exchange, Penzance. 11 February - 3 June 2023

Walking into the Exchange I saw a lot of video screens and a lot of explanatory texts. 

I instantly felt a bit depressed - that I could not be bothered, that artists seem to think a video that bores you to death with its glacial pace can compete with the snappy speed we are used to in tv. However, something kept me trying and I slowed down enough to look around. 

I found a project about involuntary infertility which I wanted to read about although I thought it was approached far too obliquely and symbolically to pack the punch visually that Melanie Stidolph's written accounts had. 

Naomi Frears shows two videos- not too long- one using written memories about her father dying and the other images of men falling off their surf boards in a variety of balletic and amusing ways. She makes a strange connection between the two and it’s eloquent. 

Then I drove over to Newlyn. Here there’s a lot of playful stuff - from a bronze fish finger

with its own sound of the sea by Eleanor Turnbull, to sea shanties with a gay slant by Rhys Morgan and choir, found seashore objects and similarly constructed complex creations by Anna Harris

and a beautiful dark stool made from ancient washed up wood by Alistair and Fleur Mackie. Oh and video of synchronised swimmers for environmental improvement. 

There’s a lot more at both places and Blair Todd has chosen and given a chance to exhibit to a variety of artists who aren’t all the usual suspects.

Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff 'A tale of Mother's Bones.'

Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff 'A tale of Mother's Bones.'

at Newlyn Gallery and The Exchange, Penzance October 19, 2019 - January 4, 2020.


This show toured from Camden Arts Centre and De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea.


The Exchange part of this show had a recording of Pailthorpe explaining in detail one of Mednikoff's paintings using Freudian and Kleinian ideas of everything relating to his experience as a baby, his earliest supposed feelings about his mother, his faeces etc.

Mednikoff 'Anatomy of Space'

She speaks with remarkable certainty about the meaning of each element of the picture - I suppose based on prolonged therapeutic discussions with the artist, 23 years younger, with whom she shared her life.

Pailthorpe and Mednikoff had a long relationship and were unusual people and artists, seeking to understand themselves and the havoc of World War Two and fascism and to use art to help people in general.


Both artists' works have similarities and use figurative surreal imagery, sometimes black and white lino cuts,

Joint work

otherwise rather delicately detailed paintings in which breasts and phallic symbols, mountains and animals make a whole narrative world on which they made detailed notes from their psychological perspective.

Mednikoff

They had the large ambition to understand the roots of fascism, seeing it as stemming from an immature inability to share the good things in life, like an incoherent unconscious infantile jealousy and fear of the baby losing its food. I know from reading Alice Miller that child rearing pratices in the early twentieth century were often harsh and threatening - depriving children of warmth and affection. It is thought that Hitler was subjected to cruelty which resulted in him developing a self protecting armour and unleashing his early repressed rage with terrible consequences.
Grace Pailthorpe also suffered a lot as a child in a bleak Plymouth Brethren household.

Mednikoff 'Bengal Colonel' 1945-7

I enjoyed the show's two parts much more than I thought I would and was told many visitors said that. There was quite a bit to read but the liveliness and colour of the paintings and the attractive way they were displayed in blocks, sometimes on different strongly coloured wall areas, made the experience enjoyable. It made me want to share a meal and talk with these two people.
The catalogue looked fascinating and had sold out.

There had been some contact with the French surrealists and on a Canadian radio broadcast, which visitors could listen to in the gallery, Pailthorpe was described as the most important English Surrealist - but in reference books on surrealism Pailthorpe is rarely mentioned. The pair used surrealist methods such as spontaneous working to reach the unconscious.

Pailthorpe 1967 - 70

At Newlyn the visitor was invited to try a two minute doodle with materials provided or to add to a book of drawings with three interchangeable parts - one of the surrealists' games.


This show made me regard the two artists with respect, reconsider the benefits of surreal experimentation, remember the power of art therapy and enjoy interacting with these works.




( Mary Fletcher worked for a time as an art therapist with adults with mental health difficulties)