Both Ends of Madness, Open Art Spaces, Fulham to Folkestone The Silk Road @openartspaces @plasticp1 @peterfrankopan

So on Friday I will be taking my piece in to Folkestone for the aptly titled  show, "Both Ends of Madness".  While the  current political climate may make this title appear to be social commentary it is actually about mental health, and my piece is concerned with the slow process of distintigration of the self that is presented by dementia.

I am delighted to be taking part in the symposium for this exhibition on Thursday 21st July between 6 and 8.  It is in the Sassoon Gallery, Folkestone. Please come along.

This weekend is the last chance to come to see me with my work at Open Art Spaces, Faron Sutaria, 506 Fulham Road, I would love to see you there. Saturday 11-4 and Sunday 12-3.

I have just started reading "The Silk Roads, A New History of the World" by Peter Frankopan. A look at the history of the globalisation of trade, and an illustration of how important trading blocks and trading relations are.





From next week I will begin charting food market prices once again, as they become affected by the flailing pound, and changing relations within the EU.  They had reached a point of some stability in my research over the last year and a half, where it had become unneccesary to keep recording that you can buy cheap fresh produce from standard street markets, feeding the needs of a family of four in fresh fruit and vegetables for around £25 a week.  And that you can currently find whatever luxury, organic,traditionally grown and fancy imported goods at farmers markets and places like Borough.  So that strand felt done.  In light of what is happening, and in this period of instability, it is not done.  We import such a large proportion of our food (around 60%)  that the prices of our most basic needs can only be affected by a fluctuating pound and changing trade relations.

These are worrying times.  We have the power vaccuum created by a Parliament which is imploding.  We have some of the most disaffected groups in our society feeling betrayed by liars and cheats, finding that what they voted for is not what they will get.  We have almost half of our society who wanted to remain in the EU feeling distressed by the result.

And I have Things Fall Apart  popping into my head at the most unuseful times.  A hundred years on from the first World War what have we learnt?

This is a time for building unity.  The cracks in our society are exposed for all of us to see, and while it may be tempting for people to play a blame game and stand on either side shouting at each other it is really important that we find areas of consensus.  That love triumphs over hate and that we put our efforts into creating social cohesion and a more inclusive and outward looking society.

Both Ends of Madness in Folkestone

PLASTIC PROPAGANDA PRESENTS: “BOTH ENDS OF MADNESS”

She walks slowly into the Leith without a boatman to guide her swiftly across

My work is featured in this exhibition in the Sassoon Gallery Folkestone, coming soon.  the exhibition deals with mental health, this piece is concerned with the process of disintigrating memory in dementia.

From Monday 4 July to Friday 22 July, Plastic Propaganda will be presenting their latest art exhibition at the Sassoon Gallery, Folkestone Library, Folkestone Kent  

Throughout the History of Art, madness and an associated range of pathologies, creative and otherwise, have informed and often accompanied the execution of artistic practice. Since antiquity, thinkers have associated creativity with psychopathology—the classic idea of the “mad genius” with stereotypes taken from both mass culture and fine art traditions.  Examples include, for example, the manic pursuit and creation of the perfect artefact or object to the recognition of creative practice per se as a displacement from trauma, addiction and illness or indeed as a therapeutic and reflexive response to such. 

The exhibition will include work by a range of contemporary artists including Richard Brooks, John Butterworth, Emily Jane Campbell, Anjula Crocker, Deborah Crofts , Dom Elsner, Jez Giddings, Lucy Gresley, William Henry, Mark Howland, Sarah Needham, Angus Pryor, Clare Smith , Kamilla Sztyber ,Sally Ward and Heidi Yssennagger.

In addition to the main exhibition, from 6pm until 8pm on Thursday 21 July there will be a public symposium which will explore and discuss some of the issues and themes suggested by the exhibition, including the iconography and content of specific works on display. There will be an open Q&A session with involvement warmly invited from the audience and members of the general public. The symposium panel contributors will include, Angus Pryor, Dr Grant Pooke, and  John Butterworth. 

For more information, please visit www.plasticpropaganda.co.uk or email wminto@btinternet.com 07775 916737 

Plastic Propaganda:

Plastic Propaganda (PP) was established in 2009 by William Henry, a UK-based installation artist and sculptor and by Angus Pryor, Reader & Head of the School of Art & Design, University of Gloucestershire. It has a track record of delivering successful exhibitions of underrepresented, contemporary artists across a spectrum of media within innovative spaces. Dr Grant Pooke, an art historian at the University of Kent, came on board in 2010. 

Its members are involved in the plastic and theoretical process of making and conceptualising art, regardless of medium. The collective has exhibited and showcased work at a range of locations in the UK and internationally, including London (venues have included the Baltic Exchange, Canary Wharf,  Covent Garden and Tower Bridge); New Delhi, Taiwan and most recently Amsterdam.  In 2015 Angus Pryor of Plastic Propaganda was involved in a major collaboration with Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum, now the Wilson, which involved the exhibition of British Biblical Art, including commissioned paintings, alongside modernist work from the Ahmanson collection.

Plastic Propaganda was established in order to provide a supportive and visible platform for both new and established artists, irrespective of medium. A strongly collaborative and inclusive ethos has underpinned its formation and development and has informed a range of national and international partnerships with galleries, curators and educators.

List of participating artists:

Richard Brooks

John Butterworth

 Emily Jane Campbell

Anjula Crocker

 Deborah Crofts

Dom Elsner

Jez Giddings

Lucy Gresley

Mark Howland

William Henry

 Sarah Needham

Angus Pryor

 Clare Smith 

Kamilla Sztyber

 Sally Ward

Heidi Yssennagger

The exhibiting artists represent a range of media, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, photographic and audiovisual practice. Their individual CV’s can be viewed on our website www.plasticpropaganda.co.uk

Lisbon to London

I have just been in Portugal where they take the role of art in economic development seriously, understanding how important culture is in creating change, desirability in neighbourhoods and optimism.  It was inspiring, and Lisbon is gorgeous, and good for your calf muscles with all those hills.  I arrived back in London, just in time to pour the wine for my opening.

Come and join me at Faron Sutaria 506 Fulham Road SW6 for open art Spaces, Sunday 12-3 and next weekend Sat 11-4 or Sunday 12-3.  I also have a piece in "Whenever I Feel Blue I start to Breath" in facebook details here
https://www.facebook.com/events/1120922464635420/

June 24-July 3rd, Earls Court Project rooms, 16-18 Empress Place SW6 1T

• Had quite alot of interest in my Tunisian Garden Lost piece in FaronSutaria, hope they come back and get into a bidding war!  That would be a dream. It  responds well to the sunshine through the window.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  So come along and see it glowing.
  

This week suddenly changed

So the show is installed ready to open on Friday 24th June.  The insurance is applied for the images are in and the invitations have gone out from me and from the sponsors, Faron Sutaria.  It's been a busy week......and then on this ordinary day, in this free society I predictably switched on Radio 4....

And as I drove back from installing the show I could hear the emotion in the presenters voice, I was confused about what had happened but then I
 heard the awful news that  British MP Jo Cox has been killed in the street leaving behind a bereaved family and a shocked and saddened Nation.

It is time to stand together against hate, to remember that it is care and love and respect of our differences which make a good society. She had more stories to tell, more of a difference to make, and this was stolen from her, from her family and from our society.

Art Rooms

Just submitted to Art Rooms for 2017. Please go to
http://www.art-rooms.org/2017-artists/ find Sarah Needham and rate me to increase my chances of winning the public prize. Please share.

Preparing for Open Art Spaces #InTRANSITFestival @OpenArtSpaces #art #show

I have been putting together and framing the work for the Open Studios coming up, the work is framed, the statement written, the lists are being done, the publicity is to be picked up on Wednesday and distributed.

And to anybody thinking of coming there will be plenty that is at the affordable end of the scale, mostly small works, prints and drawings. If you come on the Friday 24th June 6-8 at night you can have a glass of wine, and if you have a food story to share with me come on Sunday 26th 12-3.

Brugge / Bruges: Fragile connections, cutural duality, religion and torture, Chips and Chocolate @RLanduyt

So it was half term for the kids, the older one was busy studying for her GCSEs and the smaller one and I were lucky enough to spend a few days in Bruges/ Brugge. We arrived via Eurostar in the late morning, slightly delayed by industrial action that impacted on the trains from Brussels, but in time for the market where we bought the lightest and best waffles ever tasted and some delicious strawberries. The market is on Wednesdays and finishes at 1.

It was interesting to take advice about languages from the waffle seller, I explained I spoke French but not Dutch, and she made it clear that in this area they would forgive me for speaking French because I am foreign, but that I might be better off just speaking English. And having known there was some tension but not really known what it was all about, I was not much clearer when she said we are a country that shouldn't be a country.  It always interests me just which bit of history people chose for their loyalties, their sense of belonging or nationality.  You realise that the stability that we have in Europe within our nation States is fragile.  We know about Britain and Spain and the devolution arguments there,  but they are  common across other countries in Europe,  and then our own current EU UK in or out.  While these things are discussed and decided democratically then at least we have peaceful methods for this change.  So we discussed how a Belgian would know how to speak both and  would know who to speak what to, so a linguistic sophistication in the end.

The "best" chocolatier in the world The Chocolate Line is meant to be in Bruges and we did visit the shop.  It was full of very expensive chocolates in green tea and other oriental flavours.  Interesting and pretty to look at but so expensive you might not wish to buy there.  There were chocolate shops every where and most of them chains but there are meant to be about 5 shops which make thier own, we visited another one where we did buy and taste some lovely chocolate it is in the shop where the mother of the current patron still has the shop she started when she was young.  Its called Dumon, and though fairly expensive, delicious.

The tunnel at the base of the clock tower

Brugges is a beautiful medieval city, that is a pleasure simply to walk around. We went to the wonderful groeninge museum where the real power lies in the earlier galleries.  It is a wonderful exposition of the beautiful skill with which oil paints were used in very early times, and the technical abilities of those very early painters here. (The Januszczak BBC Dark Ages series which has been shown recently starts here on the steps behind the tower of the Markt, through this tunnel in fact.) It also struck me for the first time  that Stanley Spencer was really a medieval artists who situated his biblical stories in his surroundings: So that most prosaically English of artists actually a decended culturally of van de Weyden.  The city recognisable as it is today is the visible back drop of the bibilical imagery here. Previously I had always found the imagery in these landscapes fantastical, perhaps because in my mind they were associated with H Bosch.  But there I was walking through those streets... These earlier galleries show 15th and 16th Century paintings of incredible beauty and skill. 

Interestingly the  Groeninge Museum holds a painting by Jan  Provoost   which is an example of ealry censorship: "The Last Judgement" 1525. He had painted mostly clergy as his religious souls who were damned. The council of Brugges ordered 25 years later, that  this was painted over in line with Charles V decree that would not allow for the depiction of the religious clergy as disreputable.  It was only uncovered in  1965. Click on the link above for a little taste, but go there if you can.

We also went to the museum of torture, a reminder of the duality of the society at the time. I had learnt about this in school but forgotten a lot of it. This small museum had a pan European theme, linking the use of torture to classical roots in Eqypt, Greece and Rome and including law from all over Europe including Britain. The exhibition made clear that most of these tortures would never be used on the noble classes, and a disproportionate number were for controlling women.  The way force and  fear were the main means of control became clear, but it was quite difficult to make that sit with the beauty all around.  Here is one of life's truths, that the producers of beautiful things are not always the producers of beautiful societies. 

I suppose what I am thinking is that the best of the developments of the late 20th and Early 21st Century are those based on notions of rights rather than on fear.  Because this is where we go when fear wins out. And the truth is fear is a  powerful tool and therefore tempting for the powerful. But it did strike me as we came out of that museum just how much hate there was floating about under the surface of the human psyche.  So how  that fear is manipulated now, and  (if the progress we have made is to mean anything) the erosion of the rights gained has to be resisted.

  And then we went to the chocolate shops to buy chocolates for the people we love at home.