Paul Cummins – Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red

Photo: Massimo Crisafi/GuardianWitness

Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red has been one of the most popular and successful artists' installations in my lifetime. Created by ceramic artist Paul Cummins, with a setting by stage designer Tom Piper, 888,246 ceramic poppies have been progressively laid in the moat of the Tower of London to commemorate the centenary of the start of World War One – each poppy representing a British or colonial service person killed in the war.

I was unable to visit whilst the poppies were 'growing' in size, and now that I have the time, the crowds are so immense I cannot get near it! Up to 4 million are expected to have visited before it closes. They have begun floodlighting it at overnight, so perhaps a late night or early morning visit is in order before it is dismantled on November 12th (just after Remembrance Day). However, with the prime minister now jumping on the bandwagon, the 'Wave' segment (which surrounds the entrance to the Tower) will now apparently be able to be viewed until the end of the month whilst volunteers remove the rest.

I discovered Paul Cummins' work back in June 2012 when I was creating my own 'ceramic flowers' from my vast collection of blue and white fragments for an outside installation at Creekside Centre. So I am really pleased his poppies have moved so many people. The piece above was made for Chatsworth House, and below are some of my 'flowers' – blue and white fragments attached to steel rods both short and tall, and 'planted' in the earth.

Since I posted in 2012, Paul has got a proper website – www.paulcumminsceramics.com. See him talking about the work on the Telegraph's website here. Such a nice guy! And great to see 'art' finally having some relevance and giving meaning to ordinary people.
 
Even though I had not yet seen the poppies, I purchased two (£25 each) at the beginning of October – one to be a Xmas present for my mother who's had a terrible year (a truly 'annus horribilus') after her home was flooded in February. This week George Osborne actually did something good for a change and decided to 'waive' the VAT so that £1million more could go to the six veterans' charities (Cobesco, Combat Stress, Coming Home, Help for Heroes, the British Legion and the SSAFA) benefiting from the sales. Both her brothers had careers in the RAF, her father served in the 2nd World War as did my father, but one uncle has relied heavily on Combat Stress for some years after serving in Northern Ireland. Plus, my late father's birthday is November 10th, the day before  Remembrance Day. Whether her gift will arrive in time now that part of the show might be extended is another matter!

The other important thing about this piece is that the poppies were made by hand in Derby by local people, using a traditional pottery production line that had to work 24/7 to produce them on time. If such a project had been masterminded by a corporate business (perhaps thought up by a clever advertising agency), they would probably have been manufactured very cheaply in a Chinese city factory and still sold for £25 each. With Paul's project however, there are echoes of Ai Wei Wei's porcelain sunflower seeds, which were not industrially produced but hand-crafted by hundreds of skilled artisans.

Update 13 November:

Yesterday it was a beautiful sunny day, so I finally jumped on the 188 bus and went up the road to see the installation, returning on the number 47. How I have left it so long when it is so near, I cannot explain! It was already being dismantled by lots of volunteers. Later in the evening I returned with a couple of friends to see the floodlit night time display.

 

Oh to be in Venice

Jeremy Deller, Ai Wei Wei...

that's enough for me to get on a plane for, only I only just found out. far too late.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2013/may/29/venice-biennale-ai-weiwei-best-pictures#/?picture=409708053&index=15

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2013/may/28/venice-biennale-jeremy-deller-british-pavilion

I am stuck here, not just through poverty, but also by commitments to supporting projects for Convoys Wharf, ie Build the Lenox and Sayes Court Gardens and I haven't made any art recently except some lino-cutting....

Future Cities who have sketched the 'Creative Vision' that seems to be the only driving force for Convoys Wharf, will no doubt have first class hotel rooms in Venice as I post this.

If only Jeremy Deller knew what was going on here in Deptford, if only Ai Wei Wei knew what was going on here....along the same stretch of river his British agent placed him when he was with Albion and the story is here...http://thewillowpatternproject.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/ai-weiwei-irony-at-albion.html

London Art Fair 2013

A trip to London Art Fair (in the snow) yielded some interesting results: two artists working with Willow Pattern. I have flagged up both of them before, but never seen them at the Art Fair.

First up: Robert Dawson, showing on the Axisweb stand in the 'Art Projects' area. I first came across Dawson's work in July 2010 when he was showing at Jerwood Space, although he has been working with the Willow Pattern since at least 1996. I didn't see this piece then; in Spin, Dawson alludes to the spinning used to make a plate – but the only spinning here was done on his computer, then transfer printed onto bone china. Lovely.

c Robert Dawson Spin (detail) 2010.

Spin as it was shown in the Axisweb.org space

Second up: Paul Scott – who I discovered around the same time as Robert Dawson and who was part of the offering at Brighton gallery ink-d, who specialise in mostly urban/street art and were positioned on the mezzanine floor.

Hard to ignore on ink-d's stand was "artivist" (art activist) Carrie Reichardt aka The Baroness with her large politically slanted mosaics.

In the prestigious section on the ground floor near the entrance was Millennium Gallery showing German artist Caro Suerkemper who was working in porcelain and blue and white with an erotic narrative.

Meanwhile, back up in the Art Project space, Woolff Gallery were showing this by Keith Haynes. Not blue and white of course, but I mention it because I was cutting out vinyl records in 1997.

Emma Biggs Mosaic

Back in November 2012, I was preparing my application for Goldsmiths MFA. It was a mammoth task to explain why on earth I wanted to do the course, and to describe my work in terms of critical discourse. I couldn't simply say "I want to be taken seriously, and I want to make full use of the workshop facilities and technicians because I can't afford to do half the things I want to do otherwise."

I got an email last week to say I'd been unsuccessful.

As part of my preparations I looked through my favourite art books. One of those books was Matthew Colling's Art Crazy Nation. It seemed rather dated (it was published in 2001) and I wondered what he had been writing about recently. Google led me to Biggs & Collings where I found the above piece by Emma Biggs.

Not being part of the art world's social network, I had no idea they operated as a couple making paintings together, or that his wife works with mosaics – particularly with found fragments.

At Emma's own website (emmabiggsmosaic.net) I came across her project Made in England. "The Made in England mosaic is a celebration of the Stoke-On-Trent ceramics industry and its history. The mosaic incorporates a range of fragments displaying back-stamps and potters marks, representing a wealth of stories and workmanship."

There is a website for Made In England which describes the project and is now an online resource about backstamps (or 'makers' marks'). Here are some extracts from the About section:

'Made in England’ is a project supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Arts Council. It was conceived by the artist and mosaicist Emma Biggs, but involves the skills, knowledge and generous participation of numerous individuals. It is both a historical record and a demonstration of how signs and symbols influence our understanding of familiar objects and inform how we think today. (...)

(...) Ceramic tableware, the cups, plates and saucers we use every day, is unusual in one respect – each piece bears an identifying mark which tells a story. Although people may have noticed the marks on plates, they are not generally given a second thought, unless it relates to the rarity of the piece and its financial value. Marks are designed to be overlooked, they are on the bottom of plates because the important aspect is on the top – the decoration – but there is a fascinating story to be told from looking at the overlooked, the things we simply take for granted. This project aims to do both aspects of what art should do – namely make us re-examine a familiar aspect of our lives and see it in a new way. It should also be visually compelling.

Made in England begins where industrially produced ceramic began: in the pottery towns of Stoke-on-Trent. An art work in mosaic is to be installed in the entrance to the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Hanley, which houses a collection of ceramic of international importance, and receives visitors from all over the world.

The marks on the backs of plates – known in the trade as ‘backstamps’ – inadvertently convey a social history of England, and ways in which the English have seen themselves, encompassing technology, classicism, empire, nationhood and the pastoral. The name of the project is taken from these stamps. Ceramic was not marked with the country of manufacture until the nineteenth century. (...)

(...) The plates we will use will not be ones of enormous financial value – it is the fact that the art work draws our attention to a story told by everyday things, accessible and familiar to us all, that gives it its aspect of surprise.

Ultimately the aim of the project is to look at the everyday in a local, a national and an international context. The products of the ceramic industry have a particular meaning to the community of Stoke-on-Trent, thousands of whom have spent their entire working lives in the industry, and many of whom have recently been made redundant as the industry contracts under pressure from the more competitively priced products of the Far East – particularly China.

But curiously the highly skilled workforce is not alone in being displaced by the retooled Chinese industrial giants – the traditional Chinese ceramic towns are also withering, and there are fruitful and supportive links between the two communities. The history of ceramic, more familiarly known as ‘china’, is one which cannot be seen simply in a national context: the word tells you about a trading history.

The first part of this project will be in Stoke, the second will be in the London Underground, and the third will take the project to China.

Emma also writes about the project on her blog. She describes how she came to use ready-made pottery as a mosaic material but found the decorative elements too distracting, so decided to use the maker's marks instead. "The backstamps did what contemporary art seeks to do – they woke me up to new meanings residing in something intensely familiar. These plates – objects we all live with every day – were loaded with all sorts of contradictory and fascinating cultural assumptions (...) Contemporary art is about meaning. It attempts to expose our place in relation to pervasive ideologies of which most of us are only dimly aware...the quest to reveal something new, true and overlooked is what distinguishes it from decoration."

© Emma Biggs – Six roundels from Made in England, the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent

"Empire, victories at war, aristocracy (...) once I started to look, I saw it wasn't a story of power alone, but also gave a narrative of the relatively powerless, the people who worked in the potteries – or 'potbanks' as they are known in Stoke. There were batch numbers, and thumbprints, and tests of the brush, made by the 'paintresses' (...) There was a story of technological change (hand painted and underglazed versus 'dishwasher and microwave friendly)."

Emma did what I have failed to do: go to Stoke and meet the people.

In this post, she talks about how Stoke is now among the poorest cities in the UK as the industries based there have been decimated. In the following post, she describes how she got the community involved.

"As the project depended on public involvement, it was essential that as many people as possible knew about it. I contacted local TV, radio and the press. I appealed for pottery fragments and invited anyone interested to get involved. I went to public events — fairs and meetings, and circulated information. I visited clubs (I even went to a Rotary Club lunch). I alerted NORSACA — the North Staffordshire African Caribbean Association, and the local Racial Equality Council. The project was made part of the coursework for second year students from the University of North Staffordshire.  I spoke and held classes at primary and secondary schools. UNITY — the Trade Union — bulletined their members alerting them to the appeal."

She publicised the project with a series of postcards designed by George Walker and Catherine Nippe, which used words and phrases particular to the ceramics industry and well known in Stoke. On the back was an invitation to contribute along with contact details.

© Emma Biggs – postcards from Made in England

My favourite detail from the main Made In England piece is this one with the paintresses' marks:

© Emma Biggs – detail from Made in England

A Cup of Tea

Martin Parr photographs everyday life...this image is from a Tate greetings card.
www.martinparr.com

Just before Christmas I was invited by Deptford X's Matthew Couper to take part in an Art in Shops scheme he was curating in Peckham (I Art Peckham Shops, part of Peckham Space), which ran from 15th Dec to 6th Jan.

It was suggested I put my work in a greasy spoon cafe, Cafe Como. When I visited the cafe owner and asked him if he would like to use Willow Pattern to serve his breakfasts and lunches on instead of his usual crockery, and maybe put up a couple of pieces on the wall, he turned me down. He didn't want to change what he had on the walls, or have anything interfere with his imminent Xmas decorations, and was more interested in another offer to have an artist "dressed as a Victorian lady" sat in the front window for a day who would write notes on passers by.

According to the I Art Peckham Shops Facebook page, the artist who exhibited in Cafe Como was Sally Hogarth. Can't really find much more info on this. But maybe the reason the cafe owner didn't like my idea was because he'd had a look at my website and seen what I did to the crockery in Creekery.

c Sue Lawes, Creekery #1 at Ha'Penny Hatch, September 2010 (photo: Charles Shearer)

See all posts on this blog about Creekery #1.
See all posts about Creekery #2.

Adriana Varejao

Just discovered the Brazilian artist Adriana Varejao. Her work "alludes to expansion and transformation of cultural identity, yet continues the use of her theme of understanding the past in order to understand the present."

From the Liverpool Biennial website:

"Adriana Varejão’s paintings are cultural and artistic excavations. In particular, they trace the historical conjunctions that have produced contemporary Brazilian art, including Portugal’s long history of cultural cross-fertilisation with China. This complexity is exemplified by Varejão’s incorporation of traces of the transplanted Chinese artistic tradition with the Baroque influences of colonial culture.

"Portuguese Catholicism has produced some startlingly violent imagery, with graphic representations of martyrdom and disrupted flesh that literally dismember the classical ideal of the human body. These images have been absorbed into the indigenous cultural traditions of Brazil, in turn influencing the style and content of local Christian iconography.

"Portuguese artists exploited the narrative potential of Chinese ceramic decoration, especially the cobalt blue that became so popular with Europeans. It is common in both Portugal and Brazil to find blue tile decoration on the outside of buildings. Inside churches, panels of these tiles often tell stories from the lives of the saints. These narratives invariably end badly, with bodily degradation, flaying, dismemberment and various forms of penetration. A very popular secular use of the same medium is found in butchers’ shops to promote their wares. It is common to find images of joints of meat, poultry or fish hanging on hooks in these situations. The parallels with religious iconography are hard to miss.

"Varejão recalls the curious sight of damaged ceramic panels that were restored at some time in the past without any apparent attempt to reconstruct the original design. As a result, the figures have been fragmented and the frame has appeared within the composition in a bizarre configuration. For a modern viewer this fragmentation and disruption of the frame has distinctly cubist (and indeed post-structuralist) overtones, but it is also a compelling metaphor for cultural bricolage. The artist has used this strange history of iconographic conjunctions as a starting point for her paintings, often referring back to the blue tiles."

Meanwhile, this piece by Adriana made in 1997, titled Tea and Tiles II, sold for £391,250 in June this year.

Top image: copyright Victoria Miro
Middle image: copyright Liverpool Biennial
Bottom image: copyright Christies 

Shadow players Tim Noble & Sue Webster + March Against Austerity

© Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Blain | Southern 

In Willow, David Richard Quinter observes, "Thanks to whaling, one of the greatest revolutions in human history occurred at the end of the 18th century...whale-derived spermaceti oil came into general use, providing candles which burned with a clear, steady flame – giving us still our measure of 'candle-power'. It was not until 1784 that the public was able to extend day into night even more efficiently with the marketing by Aime Argand of a lamp utilizing a burner, wick and a chimney...If the nature and duration of work thereby changed, so did recreation, the arts and their performance and completion – and with bright light sources emerged the opposite: substantial, if not natural, shadows. At that point the silhouette hobby and its practitioner arose in Europe..."

"Sitting on a dresser shelf and viewed by whale oil- or candle-light...a row of Willow Pattern plates would appear much like a row of silhouettes..."

Yesterday, I caught Tim Noble & Sue Webster's show Nihilistic Optimistic at Blain | Southern in Hanover Square, on the way back from the TUC march. This is their first major solo show in London since 2006.

"Featuring six large-scale works, the show builds upon the artists' sustained investigation into self-portraiture, further deconstructing the relationship between materiality and form, which has been so intrinsic to their practice.

"The exhibition's dualistic title, Nihilistic Optimistic, responds to the oppositional forces present within these works, and indeed within the artists themselves; the show is at once constructive and destructive, hopeful and despairing. Light and shadow, form and absence, figuration and abstraction all inform one another and exist in a constant state of tension."

“There was a kind of deliberate choice not to use such recognisable objects any more, and to start fracturing things up - splintering things. So the mind has to wander in a different way, like you’re giving and taking, and it’s as much about the gaps and holes in between.” Tim Noble

www.blainsouthern.com/exhibitions/2012/tim-noble-and-sue-webster-nihilistic-optimistic

Meanwhile, here are some pictures from the March Against Austerity...

 

This is Independent journalist and commentator, Owen Jones, new star of the left. 

This yellow RMT SAYS NO! banner was adapted (with permission) from artwork I did for a local campaign against Academy Schools (DEPTFORD SAYS NO!), which was in turn borrowed from Shepard Fairey's SAY YES, who took that from Alexander Rodchennko's Everything old is new again.

Pierre Sauvageot: Harmonic Fields

On our first day in Weymouth, we went to the amazing sound installation in an old Portland quarry, Harmonic Fields. This was part of Inside Out Dorset and the piece itself was part of the London 2012 Festival (the 2012 cultural olympiad).

Harmonic Fields is an ensemble of 500 instruments, played by the wind. Harnessing this natural energy, life is breathed into the orchestra, creating a symphonic soundscape, unique to each visitor.

Pierre Sauvageot, creator of Harmonic Fields explains. “We’re constantly bombarded with new noises, which amplify, until we no longer listen. Sounds from Harmonic Fields are quiet and come at their own pace, like waves on the seashore. It is music in its simplest, most primal form.”

It was an overcast and windy day – the rest of the week was sunny and calm, and apparently there was less wind to play the instruments. In fact there was so little wind later in the week that the last day of the Paralympic sailing was cancelled.

Here's a video I found on YouTube...

My videos....




There was a lot of art on in Weymouth when I was there, although I'd missed much of the work in the B-Side Multimedia Festival as it was in its last week. Managed to see Stig Evans' Portland Colour Library of Portland and Beijing artist Lu Zheng's Waiting For Godot, both on Chisel Beach at Portland, but unfortunately missed a live gig by Bristol improv duo Eyebrow at Sandsfoot Castle since it was our last night.

Richard Harris: Jurassic Stones

Have just spent a week in Weymouth. Saw some art, but didn't see this...

 
Richard Harris's Jurassic Stones. See www.richardharrissculpture.co.uk/jurassic.html

The BBC covered the unveiling of the sculpture in February 2012: "A collection of 16 Jurassic stones mounted on steel plinths have been unveiled in Dorset to mark the 2012 Olympic games. The sculpture is near the Jurassic roundabout in Littlemoor, Weymouth, and is close to the venue for the Olympic and Paralympic sailing events.

The project is funded by Arts Council England, Dorset County Council and Weymouth and Portland Borough Council. It cost £335,000 and is part of a three-year project costing £725,000.

Each boulder weighs between two and nine tonnes. They were formed between 160 and 65 million years ago in an area of the county that would have been a tropical lagoon.

The sculpture was designed by Devon-born artist Richard Harris. Mr Harris said: "I was inspired to work with the large Bencliff Grit stones when they were revealed by the road excavations on Southdown Ridge, to preserve them and to give them a new life after millions of years under ground."

Karen Ryan

My neighbour John sent me this link...www.flickr.com/photos/bykarenryan/

Karen Ryan is a contemporary British designer. "Necessity, fate, autobiography and subversion are the key influences upon my practice. I generally use what others discard. Every discarded object is imbued with its own living history. This everyday provenance is used as narrative in the objects I design and make."