CMR 'Everything is F**ked' Feb 2017

Fred McVittie made a proposal to have this theme for a show and there were several weeks beforehand when cmr members could go into the building in Redruth, Cornwall, and be in residence to work on it.

Fred had given a talk about the idea for cmr. He and Mary Fletcher and Jacqui Orly arranged to go at the same time on some Mondays so there was some discussion and working alongside one another and I found it helpful to focus whilst there and to also continue ideas in my studio.

Stuart Blackmore had volunteered to curate and put in a lot of work. He and I both learnt that communication over this was best done by phone not e-mail and that the boundaries of how curating is to be done would be best agreed at the start of a group show.

Alice Mahoney ably put together and produced a booklet showing images and words from each of the ten artists involved which in retrospect needed more time to be available to buy during the show but will be afterwards. Since the show was only on Friday evening and Sat and Sun this documentation is especially valuable. 

Personally I would have liked our names on the poster, and posters to be available for members to put up to invite visitors from Redruth and elsewhere. There was online publicity and on source fm radio and I sent something to especially local paper in St.Ives. The Echo,  about my part in it, which was printed and had everyone’s names.

Opening Night at CMR

The names of artists by the work and titles, and the handouts about it were rather discreet to the point of being difficult to locate and the instructions for my participatory anti bullfight postcards to take and insert in postcard racks in Spain were printed in a font so tiny that a magnifying glass could have helped. The idea of selling work was mentioned as a possible line in the handouts but I did not see any reference to it . All these facets of showing work were not discussed by the group and I think we could benefit from doing this. 

What are the reasons for keeping publicity mostly to the cognoscenti, playing down sales opportunities and minimising use of the artists' names? Is it de rigueur in  alternative art anti commercial circles to be so carefully good taste about this? Is there a nervousness that the local population might be a problem if we succeeded in attracting the in ?

However, the show looked well presented, sharing preview night with Back Lane West residency brought in more people I think and a lively sense of walking up and down to visit both shows. It became a parallel world just behind the Redruth's thoroughfare.

139 visitors were recorded over the three days.

Performance by J.Orly

The opening night warmed up to a buzzing atmosphere, dramatically silenced by the appearance of a woman, naked apart from a head obscuring headdress, feeling her way outside into the cold                                                                                                                                                                                                                      evening to empty out water from a container, returning inside to sit in the window under a dripping  tin of black treacle and then donning a wetsuit. The audience was entirely respectful and attentive and no doubt un phased by this performance art but the attendance of two youths who were passing by chance added a less art schooled reaction as their amazement, consternation and politely controlled nervous laughter in the face of adult seriousness, particularly when the artist's bottom was seen to have brown stains on it, presumably from the treacle, were authentically apparent.

audience react

 I suppose every watcher has their own reaction. Jacqui Orly's performance was certainly memorable, puzzling, brave and done beautifully. It had a title 'everything is not black and white' and  somehow related to her room with photocopies of cloth in black through to white tones and shells with amplified sounds.

I think J .Orly is one of those artists whose work evolves through surreal half conscious associations which are inexplicable but leave a strong albeit bewildering impression.

Alice Mahoney

Other works were on video. Alice Mahoney had a complex montage of high end consumerism entitled ‘I’d rather have a lot of shoes and bags than having animals’.

Stuart Blackmore showed the frustration of a tangled Newton's cradle. He had also made the entrance to the show dramatically dark with flashing words in lights.

 Mary Fletcher had caught two pigeons in mating behaviour on the wall at the back of cmr, which seemed to invite the audience to identify with them and aptly fitted the theme.

Her other work included a subversion of the show's title by adding 'NOT' in red with a red wedge recalling 1917 Russian revolution art, a drawing recalling her abandoned suicide attempt as a young woman when struck by tragedy and grief, her anti bull fighting piece and two images about the refugee crisis. She had a list of 'positive verbs for action in the world' which was a new take on Serra's verbs for action which applied to his work in sculpture

Mary Fletcher

Fred McVittie had been out on the hillside as a scientist despairingly arriving from a great distance away to hold up a misspelt sign about the state of everything, which coinciding with the title of the show was not a surprise but brought over a desperate, sad appeal to the unknown watchers.

Also he had transformed himself into a swastika as which he impotently struggled to be able to move or to be terrifying in an inadequate space. The tv monitor was set in a dolls house reduced scale domestic interior which I think made the piece, with a hint from its title, about the absurd horrors of domestic violence.

Fred McVittie

Fred also had some embroidered baseball caps, such as 'make America good again' and' make Redruth great again'.

I was a bit disappointed to find the Trump substitute grunting pig I had seen when I had been in residence there earlier had been edited out, but a whole wall of collaged cuttings and ideas gave some idea of the range of peoples' sources.

Merryn Tresidder had three paintings with implied interconnections and complex titles.’

The Solution to “Brexit” explained with rope,

 1.CTRL[and Seize the means of Production]

2. ALT [Ownership of Land and Property]

3. DEL [Any Remaining Framework Allowing Existence of the Bourgeoisie}

David Axtell

 David Axtell had a range of collages and montaged puns and comments referencing, viagra, 

Trump and Farage and other things including a rewriting in less optimistic mode of a work from Yoko Ono.

Liam Jolly had a mystifying combination of curved and straight bananas with a canvas representation of a computer screen and a website address reference that needed technology to make sense of.

Liam Jolly

Tim Prykke had altered two chairs so that they would only function where they were placed and made some eloquently absurd photographs using bricks, grapes, eggs and concrete which seemed to be metaphors for impossible situations.

Tim Prykke

Jonathan Hayter had a whole room installation and used fluorescent paint and ultra violet lighting to great effect so that his expressionist anguished imagery using images of war, of religion and phallic sculpture made a powerful glowing experience once you committed to going through the curtain to be immersed in it.

Jonathan Hayter

I think the show was lively and left people with memories and images that might embody something of our difficult  times and showed artists grappling with how to express some things that were questioning and painful.

Please keep in touch with CMR, the artists's collective in Redruth, for information about future shows.

Falmouth BA show 2016

 I wake up early, eager to get to this show. Why? I want to see what this year of graduates have to show. Maybe I expect too much. Most of them are very young. The way the fine art is shown indicates nothing of the breadth and amount they have experienced. Their essays are not there, their books of ideas, we see no photos of them, very few give statements and some that do seem to be entering for pseuds' corner.

 This year I was largely disappointed. This wasn't helped by the usual lack of a canteen on Sunday or even a stocked drinks machine, and the fact that catalogues had run out and most videos were not operating.

 When I strayed briefly into illustration and found the room very dark to the point of eye strain and asked a student about this she said 'we do not find it too dark.' We found some lights and switched them on. This year the illustrators had their work on low cloche like displays on desks instead of in wooden booths at normal exhibition height for walking around. This made the room more open and spacious looking but it was harder to concentrate on an individual's work. Unlike the fine artists the illustrators show a lot of stuff. I just could not settle to examining it all and only admired one, Rachel Summers. She had illustrations to do with therapy and a light, witty, economical style.





 Fine art had the usual almost universal lack of interest in life in Falmouth, in politics, in ordinary day to day scenes, even in ecology that I have noted before. This year there was four times more interest in porn, that is four notices warning of 'adult content' whereas before I have only noticed one per year. A depressing trend.Feminism only featured, if you can call it that, which I don't, via pink vaginas.
What were the predominant themes? I can't remember but many paintings, quite a lot of installations, a bit of sound, one computer thing.

Painters seemed to have a similar palette of green, pink and yellow as if the college had provided vats of certain colours. Drawing skills were scarce and in the drawing BA favoured laboured detail using H pencils with a few flashes of acute observation.

 As an aging adult I am entirely unwilling to stoop to pick up information from the floor, to crawl into spaces, to remove my shoes, to subject myself to loud noise, claustrophobic constructions, or insanely bright light a la Don Flavin and I therefore missed a fair amount.

 Travelling to the college hopefully, with a sustaining supermarket breakfast inside me, enjoying Wood Lane's lovely trees and birdsong, plus an old pond with tadpoles and stained glass windows, and Tremough's beds of daisies were more enjoyable than the art, although maybe because the exhausting looking at the show made my senses sharper as I became more sourly dismissive yet still craving excitement.

 Best in show, and why not give the audience, which is meagre on the Sunday, a vote on this, was unhesitatingly awarded unaminously by myself and my companion to Finbar Conran's 'The protagonist and their lover' a charming, amusing, interactive piece with revolving trees and lights and music that were wired to come on if a couple sat down. It satirised romance whilst at the same time evoking it, changing our state of mind, making us laugh and getting us to participate despite being at the end of our walk round.

Whilst I was fresh and willing the first item I saw was a disturbing installation , 'Excruciating play' by J.F.Wilson. Lots to look at, many materials used and drawing us in to examine the quirky and sinister playground.

 A couple of students, out of how many? Referred to refugee migrants. By combining deck chair canvas stripes with sand castles in the shape of coffins I thought Duncan Walters expressed how sitting on a beach nowadays brings to mind those dangerous voyages of desperate people.

 A painter I liked was Grace Green because her pictures were well drawn, many layered, elaborate, decorative constructions.

 Over in the soon to be abandoned craft BA at Tremough there were several who could just as well have been in fine art although without these craft courses in the college how will students use glass, ceramics etc? Here there were references to the importance of bees and an impressive oil ruined mutation of a beast with the sound of its laboured breathing by Emily Yates, 'A toxic relationship'

 I missed so much, because it is far far too much. I missed all of architecture and product design and planning, photography of various sorts, film., performance, dance, and most of fashion and textiles.

What a pity to see no more than a dozen other visitors in several hours of looking round. Surely the college could advertise better, open the canteens and encourage the local population in and art dealers in? Isn't it worth even a double spread supplement in the local press? It's worth two days attention, but there we are, here today, gone in a few more as it ends on Wednesday, and for most students only a few business cards may fall into the hands of a rare helpful contact.

 There they go, lambs to the proverbial, degrees on their cvs and thanks to the cruelties of capitalism only a small proportion can make a career that pays any bills. Nevertheless, I believe the three or four years gap for thinking , experimenting and experiencing before their noses strike sparks from the grindstone will help us all in a society too given over to merciless daily toil versus desolation row.

'Lost for Words' Cafe Morte, Falmouth art college project space, Woodlane. Jan 2-10 2016

'Lost for Words' Cafe Morte, Falmouth Project Space, 

Jan 6-10th 2016

It's quite unusual to find an exhibition with a theme of death, grief, loss etc. The show was very diverse, some work only slightly engaging with the theme and other art that was personal and moving.

It's great that Falmouth art college after a gap of many years now again has a space where art exhibitions can be placed. 

There were many aspects of its presentation that might be improved in future. More publicity would help and having a longer show, and more posters, especially when entering the art college site. I went back in through the new graphics entrance and at first thought the small related graphics display which was very low key was the show, only finding the actual exhibition by further exploration as it was not sign posted.

Also the numbers by works were very tiny. These then took me to a numbered list and then a catalogue arranged with the artists names in alphabetical order. There were only copies to borrow but a website for further information, although no online device to use there. Coping with a numbered list and an alphabetically ordered catalogue took some patience and dedication.

If information had been on wall labels negotiating the exhibition's multifaceted artworks would have been easier.

There were four young women sitting in the corner on an arrangement of upholstered seats, all working on lap tops. One of these greeted me and later when I asked to see Belinda Whiting's book, showed me that it and other items were in that corner. The women then moved up to make room for me to sit, but it felt as if this was their corner and I was intruding.

 I doubt many visitors got themselves into the corner, where there was also a related library of books to see and an unopened package of a cake and some tea things. I am sure there was a good intention to make a sociable space for refreshments and browsing, maybe conversation, but in the hour I was there no one had used the corner for this. 

I suggest two invigilators would be adequate and that they could helpfully pay some attention to the viewers. It seemed as if these four were simply using that room to catch up on work as a handy corner and questions were an interruption to what they were busy with.

When I asked what language Janet McEwan was speaking on her video 'Riveresco' they thought it was being played backwards and had no interest in what was said, so that although one woman said wasn't it a marvellous video, I felt they were probably just liking it as a trendily super eight film, hand developed to be very scratched and old looking, not that they were not interested in any meaning. I was referred to the catalogue, in which Janet had made no mention of the work but had  given a general paragraph about her practice.

Janet's voice through the headphones was very beautiful to hear, gentle and musical, alongside images of countryside and a grave, but I really wanted more information and a translation.

The tent with objects in the centre of the room, made by Bram Arnold and entitled 'Resting Place', unfortunately had a commentary  on a device whose battery had run down. Before it ran out I heard an amusing snippet about a child calling a car  a 'flat car' when it was a fiat. I missed the human ashes, reading about them later.

Nicola Bealing contributed a large painting , 'An elegy on the Melancholy Accident at Porthleven' relating to a disaster at sea which was striking but I felt would have been better placed at one of the two ends of the room to allow a long view.

Another striking  thing was a video, by Tanith Gould, a play on 'nature Morte'  with still life and very un dead  nude young woman taking up a pose in a Renaissance sort of composition. I suppose it was light relief.

About half the exhibits, of which there were about 30, were very obscure to me or very dull. 

A lot of bits of dust even if they were collected at a doctor's surgery by Jess Russell and placed on scientific slides in a grid said nothing much to me.

The show was of interest, but I was disappointed. This was partly because of wondering why my own contributions had not been selected from the open submission. Some list of the rejected works would have been interesting. It seemed that whoever selected had wanted a wide selection of media and an  email had informed me that they had a lot submitted.

This knowledge of course made me more critical of the choices made.

The most moving item for me was the small book that Belinda Whiting had made to commemorate the short life of her daughter Sophie, who died during a heart operation at age three. The story was simply told, showing Sophie enjoying her life, and made me cry. It wasn't done in any tear jerking way, it was unsentimental and even cheerful in its way, but in its clarity and honesty and expression of personal experience it really touched me.

The idea of the show was a brave one and apparently connected to a research group at the college and there had been some discussions and other held during the show. Lucy Willow and Mercedes Kemp I think organised it.

I await hopefully a lot more art exhibitions at the college, maybe with comment books so that some feedback is sought.

I welcome comments to add to this short review.

CMR, Redruth-Digital Film Installation alongside Cornwall Film Festival

CMR. Digital film installation alongside Cornwall Film Festival. Saturday Nov 14th 2015

As far as I know CMR got involved to put this on at short notice because of a contact Cat Bagg had with Cinestar at Back Lane West. She and Alice Mahoney acted speedily to get this going and some of us put work in, installed all round the building in Redruth, which is conveniently near the cinema where Cornwall Film Festival was happening that weekend. Stuart Blackmore was technical backup. 

I managed to get a poster put up inside the cinema just where people were passing to go into the films and I decided to add all our names to it as contributors to try to interest more people.

Attendance wasn't high, it was bad weather, but a lot of those going to the analogue originated films at Back Lane West probably came to it.

There was a nice spirit of helping together at the installation and feeling it had been a good idea at the end of the day drinks. Redruth closes early, most shops were shut at 4pm, it was dark and almost deserted, four saffron buns for a pound at Warren's, and they go outside and shout this to the few people passing.

Cat Bagg, Alice Mahoney, Jonathan Hayter, Claire Stockings-Baker, Frances Walsh, Fred McVittie, David Axtell, 

Morwenna Morrison and myself took part.

Alice chose my 'Art Notes' from what I offered. It's a satirical piece about trying to make a mark as an artist and the sound, a song, is essential to it. I saw someone using the headphones and laughing so I was pleased. It can be seen on my Vimeo page, 1min 46.

This brings me to a point that I like the length of films to be posted so I can decide whether to embark on them. I also like a notice about them posted by them and only some of the work had this, otherwise there were notes in a handout but only three copies of it. The notes were very interesting and illuminating.

On the same floor Fred McVittie had a piece which a young man told me he was very confused about. I asked if he was an artist and he said no, he was a media studies student, which seemed a bit sad to me to differentiate between the two. Fred's blurb referred to graffiti and protest art and the film, rather strange and menacing perhaps embodied I thought frustrated rage and alienation.

Alice Mahoney's 'feast' was really a metaphor about consumption, a rather grotesque meal slowed down.

Jonathan Hayter showed experimental colourful imaginatively made forms, with music by David Handford, and strobe lights.

Claire Baker's video was projected in one of the rooms and made an impact as a lone adolescent girl wandered in a stark landscape, rather poetic and moody, a sublime contrast to Fred's figure emerging in a lonely landscape, and my person in an urban cul-de-sac.

Downstairs Cat Bagg had work using standing stones that were seen in a whirling around inventive way inside circular vignettes with a pattern of lights on the floor. She explained to me some of the complexity of working out how this was done to fit the space.

David Axtell had a brooding sunset behind a structure of Tibetan flags on a sea edge cliff and went alongside a poem about loss and war by Laurence Binyon.

Frances Walsh showed 'Lighting a fire' , a beautifully filmed piece with clear colours and subtle sounds in which the artist collaborated with her young son.

Morwenna Morrison also used a room to install her piece, which had a lovely old armchair for viewing and getting into the mood of her montaged shots from old footage about marriage, which cast rather a jaundiced and wry comment on the institution and is part of her focus on nostalgia in her work.

As usual a very mixed bag, easy to move amongst and take in as the visitor felt inclined.

This was in contrast to the Cinestar films at Back Lane West, which had the advantage of being seen from start to finish but the disadvantage that the rolling programme leaves a viewer stuck in experiences they may tire of because they are not to their taste. Some of it was very fuzzy, some abstract experiments that were a bit long for me. Also it was even colder than CMR and with only a hard box to sit on whereas up the road we did have a few chairs.

Meanwhile the festival was at the  proper cinema, this year warm enough thank goodness. It's quite expensive to go to things, it's reduced in scope, little publicity, no Cornish films, no artist-made experimental section now and I regret none of the cameraderie I  felt when it was all in Falmouth Poly or Princess Pavilions and one got into conversation and film making and film makers felt like a wonderful group of colleagues. There was more of that at CMR's impromptu drinks.

I saw at the cinema the films from Falmouth media program, and the room was packed with new students from the course. Oddly only three films were chosen to be screened and although they had some interest for me, some good acting, some novel ideas, the overall impression made on me was that all the students would be thinking they would do much better themselves.

This was followed by ' Taxi Tehran'  by Jafar Panahi , winner of the Golden Bear at Berlin Film Festival  this year, which I loved. It was ingenious, brave, funny and moving and so apt on the day after the Paris atrocities to see a film maker persisting in expressing himself within the oppressive regime of Iran, where he has been forbidden from making films and I read that one of his works was smuggled out to to Europe on a data stick hidden in a cake. I started to applaud and after a moment others joined in. It's the sort of thing that can happen at a festival showing.

So, from a completely realised drama about the most important things in life to experimental scratching on celluloid. An amazing day of contrasts.

Soil Culture:Deep Roots, Falmouth Art Gallery Sept 9 to Nov 21, 2015

'Soil Culture:Deep Roots' Falmouth art gallery Sept 9 to Nov 21 2015. 

This exhibition is celebrating the UN year of soils and will be touring to Plymouth University Jan to March 2016. 

An important subject, but does it make an enthralling exhibition? 

It's unusual to see such world famous artists as Ana Mendieta in Falmouth and I was hoping maybe for too much as I entered the gallery. 

Ana Mendieta

Ana Mendieta

Ana Mendieta's work stands out because she involved herself, specifically her own body in filmed performances in which her naked form is seen , here emerging from under stones and earth, or the space where it has been, set alight with bright flames, or left as an impression. A book available to read in the gallery is helpful in telling her story and explaining her wish to somehow enact personal rituals to be in touch with Mother Earth as if longing for a prehistoric awareness of it. It's intensely romantic to my mind, and as she died in a tragic accident at a young age the story of that incident and her husband, artist Carl Andre being accused of murder and acquitted, the vivid tragedy threatens to impede serious consideration of her art. However in this show it is the most attention grabbing and dramatic piece and nicely shown with a comfortable and beautifully crafted wooden seat opposite the three small screens. Also helpfully the time of the video is given so you know how long you might take to receive the images, which are only about three minutes and seen simultaneously.

 Suzanne Williams also uses video and contributes a page of poetic explanation but it's all too 'magical' for my liking, and it's not clear how long the video is so I did not take the time to do it justice. 

In another corner Daro Montag has a video of a circular agglomeration of writhing worms that he somehow attracted to a spot to film and I overheard a visitor saying they could watch it for hours. His work depends on getting nature to make it and he also shows a piece of film, buried in the earth and now illuminated to show how soil microbes ate away at it and produced coloured marks. 

Daro Montag

Daro Montag

Elsewhere several artists use earth to make marks and they are all using grid form to present them, rectangles by Herman de Vries, spots by Sandra Masterson, Richard Long's thumb prints, all making repeat patterns. The colours are earth colours, the excuse for the work is the soil idea but the results are pure abstract pattern making.

Herman de Vries

Sandra Masterson

Richard Long

Mel Chin

Paolo Barrile

Some ideas I really warm to, clearing a field of contaminating chemicals, by Mel Chin, shown us via an ancient looking beautifully drawn diagram, and Paolo Barrile's sweet little bottles of soil are very attractive and linked to a long project also about pollution. The ideas are important and the carrying out of them but the chart and the tin bottles seem like charming souvenirs of that. 

Adam White has an attractive watercolour map of geology of the British Isles but can't resist a whimsical jokey key of nonsense he has made up that infuriates me. 

Adam White

Claire Pentecost has a large collection of large earth ingots and drawings with all sorts of references that rather timidly hint at the evils of capitalism. 

Claire Pentecost

David Nash exchanged turf from Wales and Kensington to see what grew. 

David Nash

Andy Goldsworthy shows a lovely exuberant drawing for an earth work that he has made. 

Andy Goldsworthy

Matt Robinson piles up mud bricks from a building being made in Cornwall. They are being carefully maintained to not dry out which makes me wonder how they will fare in the inter faith Building, where I believe they will be indoors. 

Matt Robinson

That's a brief whizz round it.  It's unsatisfying somehow.  Certainly it rises awareness of soil, makes us think about it, but it's mostly a bit dry, not watered by liveliness, it needs a lot of work reading the blurb. It shows how difficult it is to make vibrant art about soil or with it and how strong is the urge to organise in grids. 

There's Ana Mendieta exhibiting her body and impressions she made with it and did things to, making a spectacle of herself, and Daro Montag, exhibiting ingenious images he induced natural living organisms to make, keeping his body out of it. 

I imagine Mendieta in a sort of sensationalist tv series getting the worms to squirm on her naked body, why the nakedness, impulse to shock, the only way she could get attention? Carl Andre , her husband , getting attention by coolly arranging bricks in a grid- bricks, mud, earth, fire, would be interesting to see them also here. 

Combine the body impression in the earth with the presumably used worm food to get worms all over the body impression? Then it's sort of Hamlet, death, transience? That's my concept, Mendieta plus Montag. 

I did buy my first copy of 'Resurgence' ecology magazine to read later, and I am still turning 'Soil' over with my mental spade.

anonymous experiments with materials provided