MAYBE it’s the impending election. A number of Islington art galleries are hosting politicised exhibitions and events this month.
Parasol Unit has scored a coup with a solo show from Cuban-born duo Los Carpinteros (Marco Castillo and Dagoberto Rodríguez) – their first major show in London.
The ground floor of the gallery will house large installation Tomates, 2013, a torrent of 200 real tomatoes flung against a wall recreated in porcelain and the splash captured in watercolour.
There is a tempered anger in this staged representation of protest. Tomatoes have a violent history, they’ve been chucked by Peta supporters at fur wearers, the Dutch king was pelted by them in 2013 and of course the festival of La Tomatina celebrates a tradition where frustrated villagers would chuck rotten tomatoes at their council officials.
“At the time that Cuba is the talk of the world, to have the solo show of Los Carpinteros in London is simply beyond belief,” said Parasol Unit director and curator Ziba Ardalan.
“Come and see how irreversible socialism can be reversed by joy of life in the short film Conga Irreversible.”
The film follows a large-scale traditional Cuban carnival procession performed back to front. The 100 dancers, musicians, choreographers, composers and costume designers slowly disappear backwards down Havana’s famous Paseo del Prado; the costumes, the dance moves, the lyrics to the song all meticulously arranged in reverse, recognised as a humorous dig at Fidel Castro’s assertion of “irreversible socialism”.
The question of how older people are considered in public will form the focus of the Public Wisdom Symposium at Conway Hall.
The one-day event is organised by the Cubitt Gallery’s education team to provoke a reassessment of our aging population beyond headlines screaming of a “ticking time bomb”.
The line-up includes performance artist Lois Weaver on sex and ageing in public, and anthropologist Jason Danely on abandonment and public life in Japan, while Pollard Thomas Edwards Architects and Older Women’s Co-Housing will discuss their radical co-designed housing development for older women.
Furtherfield Gallery is to host the Spanish activist campaign and art competition Young Fraud on March 28. This is the second year of the prize, launched in response to widespread cuts in art funding.
The awarded artists Isabel Servera and Guillem Portell and the promoters of the campaign will be at the gallery to present the project and showcase the artworks as part of an international tour.
FOR many, a trip to the dentist is a dreaded affair and people will often put up with excruciating toothache before making an appointment. Yet former patients mingled with ex-colleagues at retired dentist Vicky Lee’s recent 70th birthday party (wearing red below).
She proudly wears a hand-made badge reading “keep ’em clean”, created by Hannah Hill, the third generation of a family that Vicky treated for more than 40 years at her Regent’s Park Road surgery.
She retired from the Primrose Dental Practice earlier this year but former patients still keep in touch. “People sit in planes and trains and find I am the person that links them,” she said. “I’m often the common person.”
Vicky joined the wave of dentists in the early 1980s that challenged long-held practices and looked instead at a holistic approach to dentistry, or what has been termed “mentistry”.
“I started investigations when I myself was affected by mercury in 1983 at the birth of my daughter,” she said. “I’ve always been interested in mind and emotions in relation to dentistry.
“Teeth have a very deep meaning. In the story of Peter Pan the description of him is he hasn’t lost his baby teeth. He hasn’t grown up. The loss of teeth, both as a child and an adult, can have very deep implications in the psyche.”
Holistic dentistry seeks alternatives to conventional treatments, including surgical interventions, root canals, the use of amalgam and mercury in fillings and fluoride in toothpaste. Vicky was open to exploring the possibility that everyday dental materials could affect the patient’s health, and offered individual sensitivity tests and used traditional Bach Flower Remedies.
“I was very interested in the wider field than the teeth – the transpersonal psychology of people,” she said. “It wasn’t just somebody having a tooth problem – the crisis could be related to what was happening in their life. I worked with the patients to make sure they felt better leaving the surgery than when they arrived.”
Vicky’s interest in the mind spills into her work as an actor. She performs with Spare Tyre theatre company, a group that works with people aged over 60, those with advanced dementia and adults with learning disabilities. She previously played a “wriggling inflammation in a blister” at the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate and appeared in Still Life Dreaming at the Edinburgh Festival in 2011, a drama based on the epic academic study into cognitive function where Scottish children born in 1936 were tested aged 11 and again at age 70.
Vicky plans to continue working with Spare Tyre into her retirement.
FOR almost a year Isabel Langtry, principal of the Hampstead School of Art, has been watching the brick cladding disappear from the large building next door in Kiddipore Avenue. The school’s printmaking room provides the perfect view to watch 52 luxury Barratt Homes emerge from what was the King’s College reference library.
It would be easy to assume that an independent not-for-profit art school and one of Britain’s biggest family house builders would not make easy bedfellows but Barratt are set to build Hampstead School of Art’s new campus.
“Barratts have never done anything like this before,” she says. “We’re the greatest asset of selling the new development and they said ‘tell me more’ and we haven’t looked back. They’ve been brilliant.”
The ambitious four-storey, purpose-built art school has been designed by Allies and Morrison, the architects responsible for contemporary dance company Rambert’s new headquarters on the Southbank. The site next to the residential development lies empty, waiting for the school to raise £400,000 by September, with an overall target of £2million.
The current total raised – an impressive £150,000 – is written in chalk on the staircase, the school’s fundraising barometer.
“The school will never be in that uncertain period again,” she says. “I don’t want a building problem any more. We don’t make a profit from the school fees. Any excess goes towards helping those who can’t afford the fees.”
Hampstead School of Art was founded in 1946 as a community art education charity by Jeanette Jackson and Bernard Gay with the patronage of Henry Moore.
Isabel works hard to continue the original ethos of encouraging both established artists and complete beginners with a mix of classes and outreach projects.
The school has already moved venues three times since its foundation. Each corner of the school is used for art making. It’s uneven wooden floors, large bay windows and the heady smell of turps creates a picture-perfect image of an art school. Every windowsill is covered in art pieces; the walls heavy with students’ and teachers’ work.
Isabel is adamant that this charm will flow into the new building, even planning to transplant some of the flooring. “The students trust me that we are going to create a school that will be sensitive,” she says.
“We want to have a quirky building that responds to students.
“Our school is about creating opportunities and I find opportunities in lots of little dark corners.”
Quite literally. Isabel knocked through three little storerooms in the attic to create a studio for portrait painter and former student Abbi Yentis after she became disillusioned with her university course.
“Abbi was very unhappy on her course. I encouraged her to stay at the university but after a few months she said ‘I’m still not getting enough here’. I had every confidence in the artist she could be. So I wrote her a course.”
This new three-year programme at Hampstead School of Art includes 18 hours a week direct teaching with tutors specialising in portraiture – miles away from the average nine hours a week “contact” time with university tutors revealed in an NUS study.
“Art schools have changed so much. I think I was in the last wave to benefit from a tailor-made education. There was none of this pre-ordained hoop-jumping,” she says.
“I’m appalled by it, honestly. I believe education should be responsive, not a conforming procedure or recipe. It just goes to show you how art schools no longer respond to individuals.
“This school is pioneering a return to the days of students being individually taught. With Abbi it absolutely suits her.”
Abbi is set to complete her first year in July with the course now boasting a waiting list.
Born in Lagos, Nigeria, Isabel grew up surrounded by art. Her parents – a doctor and a physicist – were keen collectors of African and South American sculpture. Many of the artefacts were payment for her father’s medical services.
After the family relocated to Manchester, Isabel studied at Hull University and Central St Martins. Her bronze and crystal sculptures have been exhibited in Mall Galleries and Whitechapel Art Gallery.
Next week sees two of Isabel’s sculptures installed on Hampstead Heath outside the Hampstead Affordable Art Fair. Sales of the £25 ticket to the charity private view on June 10 will go directly to the appeal as the chosen charity beneficiary of the fair.
Any donations over £5,000 will receive Isabel’s sculpture, The Knock Drummer.
There are many other opportunities to support the school, purchase a secret artist postcard or get involved with the Summer of Art in Hampstead, a riot of workshops, exhibitions, stalls and live art events from June 10-July 19.
“It’s a living, breathing project. I have to give my all,” she said. “If we failed to raise £2million we will let down so many people.”
ROBERT Cohan fell in love with dance while serving as a teenage GI in the Second World War, and aged 90, he is still creating work.
Robert’s life in dance reads like a Broadway show. Inspired by catching the Royal Ballet in London during the Blitz he joined “Mother of Modern Dance” Martha Graham’s company, eventually partnering her, bringing contemporary dance technique to the UK as founding artistic director at The Place in Euston in 1967.
Later this month The Place is to stage Robert Cohan at 90, honouring this pioneering dancer and choreographer. There’s a chance Robert might even appear in a cameo role onstage as himself.
A lifetime in dance means that Robert still finds himself keeping time during everyday activities, counting his steps as he climbs stairs and the rate of slicing as he cuts onions. He believes this mindful division of time and movement is second nature to dancers.
“Dance only exists ‘now’. Scientists have figured out that ‘now’ lasts between two-three seconds, everything else is past and future,” he said. “I think every dancer knows this. It’s those two-and-a-half seconds where you exist, you were alive at that point. Any dance is a sequence of two-three seconds. If you perform a lot you learn to live those one after another. You learn how to be present.
“My approach to choreography is to try and not get in the way. In all the other arts you can work anytime. With dance you can only work when you have the dancer and the studio. You know you have to be creative at 2pm on a Tuesday. You have to come in primed and magnetised.”
Growing up in Brooklyn, Robert remembers running to catch double bills at the cinema, ingesting Fred Astaire musicals as reality, believing that men and women actually fall in love through a well-choreographed Busby Berkeley dance number.
Classical music wasn’t part of his childhood, if it came on the radio it was turned off. When we meet in The Place foyer he looks every inch the classic “choreographer” from a 1930s musical, leaning lightly on a walking stick, his laissez-faire scarf draped over a shoulder yet his accent retains the strong pull of Brooklyn.
The well-stocked libraries in army camps fed Robert’s thirst for inspiration. He would spend hours listening to classical music and reading Zen Buddhism books. “I came at it left field,” he said. “I didn’t come to analyse it in any way, just accepted it. I came to it as music I had to respond to physically, that was my approach and it stayed my approach.
“After the war I was strong. I only had to learn what to do with my body. I was seeing a girl, a dancer. She came to New York to study with Martha Graham and thought I would like it. I was hooked and knew then what I was going to do. I said to her ‘I don’t know how to dance yet’ and Ms Graham said ‘there’s only one place to learn to dance and that’s on stage’. So I took her advice.”
The choreographer is still reacting to classical music from an impartial position. In new quartet Lingua Franca he found that Bach’s solo for violin in D minor wasn’t quite long enough so simply called in long-term collaborator Eleanor Alberga to improvise an extra 10 minutes of music.
“It’s about four people moving to this gorgeous music, each making their own statement to explore space and dance itself. So far it has worked. I feel it’s up to choreographers to tell audiences that they don’t have to worry about what it means. I know the music very well, it’s my physical relationship to the music through the dancers. I don’t just think about it, my nerves get together and go into the muscles and tell them what to do. That’s mostly how I’ve always worked.”
While Robert’s technique may have remained true for decades he has noticed the role technology now plays in studio time. “It’s all changed, everyone videos everything on their phones and iPads during rehearsals and puts it on their laptops. If I say ‘do you remember what you did yesterday?’, everyone runs off to check on their laptops and I’m left standing alone in the middle.”
A prelude to Lingua Franca will expose this trend for “digitally enhanced” rehearsals with a possible walk-on cameo from Robert playing himself. It comes as no surprise that Robert is sitting on an unopened archive including every photo and review from his long career.
With the 90th birthday celebrations this month, people have been urging him to open the bulging boxes he has stored away but he is adamant not to look back, not to live in the past.
“I don’t live in my memory,” he said. “I decided long ago to say yes to everything” he said. “If you say no you can’t do it. I’ve been saying yes for years. That’s how I got it all done.”
• Robert Cohan at 90 is at The Place, 17 Duke’s Road, WC1, on Friday, March 27, at 8pm. Tel: 020 7121 1100.
*First published in the Camden New Journal, West End Extra and Islington Tribune
Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime at Wellcome Collection
NEW exhibition Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime at the Wellcome Collection is much more than a memento mori. Rather, it reveals a tapestry on the human condition, both the depths of sorrow and cruelty and the magnificence of human endeavour and love.
Frances Glessner Lee’s Nutshell Study of Unexplained Death, a 1950s crime scene model photo: Bethlehem Heritage Society/ The Rocks Estate/ SPNHF Bethlehem, New Hampshire / Photographer: Ralph Smith
A few steps from the entrance lies a real crime scene, a chilling collection of blood-smeared studio floor tiles where Mexican artist Luis Miguel was murdered. It seems ludicrous that such vital evidence can be transplanted from Guadalajara into a London gallery. Alongside the grief and anguish embedded into 32 Anos, 2006, artist Teresa Margolles – close friend to Miguel – presents a damning and macabre indictment on the levels of unsolved crimes in Mexico.
Curators Lucy Shanahan and James Peto – both surprisingly admit to squeamishness – have called upon some astonishingly poignant art pieces to stand alongside the mortuary tools and courtroom documents. What becomes clear is our perennial fascination with the movement of life from bodies and the role art can play in not only understanding these feelings but as a partner in solving crimes.
In the 1950s American heiress Frances Glessner Lee created beautiful, scaled wooden models or “nutshell studies” of real unexplained death scenes; one of which is included within the exhibition. These still form part of forensics-based police training due to their astounding detail down to the correct shadings of flesh during decomposition.
Forensics begins at the crime scene moving through to the mortuary and ending poignantly with Taryn Simon’s Innocence Project, a portrait series depicting those wrongfully convicted people who have been exonerated following DNA testing.
The Chinese magistrate Song Ci’s 13th-century text The Washing Away of Wrongs is understood to be the first forensics guide and was simply edited for centuries; the poetry of the title is a moving reminder that exactly the same impulses to understand death that motivated him, have subsequently pushed innovations in MRI and 3D scanning.
“Sometimes in the past they thought much more broadly and spiritually about death,” said Lucy.
The 18th-century Kusozu paintings depict a noblewoman’s post mortem journey as her body progressively decays.
“The Kusozu watercolours weren’t intended as forensic illustrations but it aligns with what we are exploring, the impermanence of the human condition,” she added.
And there are Sally Mann’s respectful portraits made during her time at a Tennessee body farm where researchers can note the decomposition of corpses left to the elements. These artworks not only inform forensic science but provide clues on contemporary attitudes to death.
Sejla Kameric’s commissioned installation Ab uno disce omnes (from one learn all) leaves an emotional drag that is hard to shake. A working mortuary fridge stands as if made from granite not steel. Inside the chill, 85 hours of images randomly flash upon the wall projecting data relating to identifying body parts from a mass grave; forensic reports painfully speed past harrowing film footage. This work also exists as a growing web project where people are invited to submit their own data.
“We certainly wanted to make it elegant, personal and human, hence involving artists looking at human response,” said chief curator James. “There can be a poetry in something quite gruesome. It’s important that there are positives, that it’s not all about convicting but also delivering justice, getting to the truth, letting off the innocent and finding the guilty. I’m happy it feels quite human, it could feel very voyeuristic and quite nasty but on the whole, hope and humanity comes through strongly.”
• Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime runs until June 21 at the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, NW1 2BE. Tel: 020 7611 2222 or visit www.wellcomecollection.org.uk
*First published in the Islington Tribune, Camden New Journal, West End Extra
THAT famous Britpop rivalry between Oasis and Blur in the 1990s has nothing on the historical spats between some of the finest British artists.
Scottish painter Mackie has decided to capture such squabbles in a series of Dollhouse paintings. In fact, he has taken it one step further and imagined conversations between the feuding creatives, deciding that Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon would have almost definitely insulted each other with the slur You Were Shit in the 80s, the title of two pieces and Mackie’s solo show at the James Freeman gallery, Upper Street.
Miniature reproductions from both 20th-century masters are secreted within isolated derelict houses. The buildings stand alone, seemingly abandoned, until you notice the cutaway wall revealing a masterpiece.
Freud’s Standing by the Rags, 1989, appears in a decaying Victorian building in Toxteth; Bacon’s Second Version of Triptych, 1944, hangs in an abandoned asylum near Glasgow. These two great artists had a famously spiky and competitive friendship and it’s a smart move from Mackie to separate the two, remove an obvious audience and place them in isolation.
“Initially, his idea was to paint dolls’ houses but it was getting too heavy so he started taking out the more explicit elements,” said gallerist James Freeman. “The artworks are collected within a cherished dolls’ house, the place for your imagination.”
Hockney’s Portrait of Nick Wilder overlooks an eerily empty motorway from the Lancaster service station, referring to his cutting remarks in 2012 of Damien Hirst’s lack of “hands-on” craftsmanship. Hirst’s shark responds, floating mouth agape within an isolated country barn.
Another humorous work, Who Invented the Hole, pitches those two giants of sculpture, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, in an argument over who was the first to put a hole in it; Moore’s Oval with Points (1968-1970) stands tall in an abandoned farmhouse on a suitably frosty morning.
Beyond the homage to soap opera-style art world rivalries, there appears to be an overt comment on the nature of collecting, these great pieces are revealed as if caught trapped by a dusty host. There’s an almost gothic dereliction to these buildings that could allude to private collections or to the claustrophobia of art institutions where lauded pieces of work can stand unquestioned in the same room for decades.
• You Were Shit in the 80s is at the James Freeman Gallery, 354 Upper Street, N1, from March 6-28, 020 7226 3300, www.jamesfreemangallery.com.
A KAYAK will be cutting swathes through the Barbican in a stunning new commission from Roman Signer.
The empty vessel will emit a soft drone as it is dragged along the floor by a rope suspended from the ceiling, tracing the 90-metre sweep of the Curve gallery.
A still from Roman Signer’s 2000 film, Kayak
For three decades the 76-year-old Swiss artist has fractured and dismembered kayaks in his work, often read as a symbol for the bucolic landscapes of his homeland, but this latest kayak is intact, passenger-less and balletic.
The fibreglass vintage boat in Slow Movement is sanitised within the gallery, a structure designed for speed slowly guiding viewers until pivoting 360 degrees with an elegant loop to repeat the journey.
“He was very clear when he came for a site visit,” said curator Alona Pardo. “He automatically understood the space. Roman has a very selective sculptural vocabulary, there’s still so much he hasn’t done with those objects.”
His acclaimed 8mm film Kayak also transposes a boat out of water with Signer sat in a blue kayak as it is scraped along a Swiss country road by a truck. The film will be screened alongside another film Eskimo Roll, where rope is wrapped around the canoe stretching over to a bicycle; as the bike wheel revolves it sets off an uneven rolling-pin motion in the kayak.
Signer once said that he wished to see in slow motion and his previous works, whether speedy or laboured, attest to that desire.
Chairs are flung, tables are launched and a firework propels hats as Signer plays with time and subverts context.
“He’s made work that is really slow and also work that is dangerous and explosive, he plays with these extremities,” she said. “As he grows older he likes to slow things down. There is a sense of meditation on where he’s got to in his work.”
• An installation based on the contents of Signer’s library will be exhibited at the Rose Lipman Building in Dalston to coincide with Slow Movement. Roman Signer’s Library of Marvels (Fast Version): A project by Rachel Withers runs from March 5 to April 4. For more visit www.themillcoproject.co.uk/roman-signer/
A HAND-STITCHED quilt is a charged site of memory, not only the memory of the time-consuming process but the narrative embedded in the scraps of material and the life lived during its creation.
Three large quilts currently hang in not-for-profit shop Outpost in Holloway Road, each one sings with the community effort involved.
Our Collective House is a large textile map created over nine weeks in the Whittington Park Community Association, marking out the parks and roads in the Nags Head area with patterned material and careful stitchwork.
Familiar landmarks will scream out to residents, the row of books marking out Manor Gardens library or the green felt football pitch near Tufnell Park Road. While other landmarks are more personal: a couple snuggle under a patchwork duvet and two foxes are caught nuzzling. An embroidered list of the 13 people who created the piece run down the left hand side.
“Community quilt-making is a simple but powerful way to build skills, wellbeing and social connection,” said show coordinator Orla O’Flanagan. “Sewing together hand-stitched quilts is not only therapeutic for makers, but also a striking way to layer a narrative and tell a shared story.”
The exhibition venue Outpost is an initiative from the Peter Bedford Housing Association (PBHA), a supported housing charity who work with socially excluded adults.
Members from the PBHA Creative Crafts group created a piece that explores identity and family. A black and white portrait of a baby – PBHA member Laura – being held stands out.
“My grandma is very special to me,” said Laura. “I love her cooking and her kind words to me. This is what inspired me to put us on the quilt”
The third piece was created by more than 80 people on Spitalfields City Farm and includes an interactive function whereby oral histories can be heard if you press the right patch in the quilt.
• Outpost is hosting free sewing workshops on March 14 and 28. Participants are encouraged to bring scraps of materials. The Community Quilt Exhibition runs at Outpost, 546 Holloway Road, N7 6JP, until April 5.
ARCHITECT-turned-topiarist Tim Bushe’s delightful shrub creations are already popular sights around Islington, often attracting sightseers, and now his work can be spotted in the Selfridges’ window in Oxford Street. His skilful hedge trimming is celebrated in the department store as part of their series Bright Old Things 2015, a tribute to 14 individuals who have embraced new vocations later in life.
Tim may be a known locally for his hedgecutting but he has already made a mark on the borough with his Highbury architecture practice, responsible for the Wagamama at Angel and the former Bierodrome in Upper Street.
The west-end window display depicts a dog startling three cats, in reference to both his wife Philippa’s love of cats and the Bushe family’s experience looking after guide dog puppies, they are currently providing a temporary home for 10-month-old Labrador puppy Naomi. Bushe’s figure has also been immortalised inside the store. A leather-clad figure of Tim can be seen diving head first into a giant topiary 5ft-wide tennis ball.
The ball will be auctioned on eBay to raise funds for charity Hft that has supported his younger sister, Martha, who has Down syndrome.
The 61-year-old Highbury resident has already fundraised nearly 90 per cent of his target goal of £5,000 for the charity with his living installations, including a hippo in Tufnell Park and a Scottie dog in Finsbury Park.
His most famous – the caravan of elephants standing on the corner of Ambler Street – was borne out of a request to prevent anti-social behaviour.
Naomi Schillinger, resident and member of neighbourhood group the Blackstock Triangle Gardeners, called on Tim’s skills after spotting the steam train hedge outside his Balfour Road home.
Armed with an electric 42-inch Black & Decker trimmer and egged on by his wife, Tim began carving hedges five years ago and quickly noticed the impact they can have on an area, the sculptures become local landmarks, provoking conversation between neighbours and passers-by.
“I was quite surprised to see myself in the Selfridges window,” he said.
“Friends have been calling up after recognising me. I started messing around and it’s just snowballed from there.”
• For details on Tim’s fundraising visit www.justgiving.com/tim-bushe/
THERE’S a popular hashtag used on Twitter #firstworldproblems where people acknowledge their concerns from a place of privilege: when Waitrose runs out of milk froth or bemoaning the wardrobe space needed to hang new purchases.
Zinnie Harris’s new two-hour straight-through behemoth takes that hashtag and spins a middle-class Western world view into orbit. There’s a lot of contemporary references to pick up on and stew on long after the stalls are cleared.
Maxine Peake’s Dana is a woman in control of her sexual desires and her career, yet she staggers from an awkward morning-after-the-night-before into a Europe caught in economic freefall where the only glimpse at survival is getting to Alexandria.
Peake brings her trademark nuance to the role. Her short-lived paramour – a solid Michael Shaeffer – tries to convince Dana he is the Devil and unless he can pay her for their tryst promises retribution. It’s a curious mix of mysticism and dystopic reality. One assumes that the slightly stilted and disjointed dialogue is intentional – it definitely cements the Peer Gynt-style fantasy.
In many ways Chloe Lamford’s disjointed Ikea showroom design is superfluous to such a complicated and packed storyline yet when the stage literally ruptures, it is magnificent; the ramped floor sliding down to potential horror and death.
Christine Bottomley is a steady support as Dana’s pregnant sister Jasmine and her heart-wrenching monologue is worth the ticket price alone, ripping away any space between the stage and seating.
UNTIL MARCH 21
020 7565 5000
*First published in the Camden New Journal, West End Extra and Islington Tribune
THE image of three teenage girls stepping confidently through an airport towards a no doubt grisly future as “jihadi brides” has covered front pages recently.
So it is prescient programming from the Tricycle to show John Hollingworth’s Multitudes as it asks, among other things, why are British girls so drawn to such a geographically remote war?
For Qadira (Salma Hoque) her motives are wrapped tightly around losing her mother to cancer and her father Kash to his MP ambitions and new girlfriend Natalie (Clare Calbraith). She tries to explain her dislocation from Britain: “The next young Muslim you treat like shit is the next young Muslim on a plane over there.”
The broader question of identity runs throughout as Bradford residents struggle to place themselves in the aftermath of a Tory general election win and a slew of attacks on mosques.
Multitudes is let down by a lack of love – between Kash and Qadira, Natalie and her new-found Islamic faith – exemplified by the run of quick scene changes. When director Indhu Rubasingham allows the action to slow, the monologues from Quadira, father Kash and recent convert Natalie are compelling. It would have been helpful to see greater tenderness and dimensions in a play that is so determined to show a breadth of British experience but it is a smart choice by Hollingworth to set it in his home city of Bradford.
The references to local spots – and the ubiquity of a Greggs – are hugely unifying. Tellingly, the moment when Multitudes cuts through to the audience was when Kash accused Tory delegate Julian (impressive role-changing from Asif Khan) of being a “coconut”. The gasp from us seated is proof that this slur is ripe for future dramas.
MOST people look towards sleep as a time to switch off from the stresses of daily life, but artist Will Mackrell sees it as prime time to create work. His solo show Touch & Go at William Benington Gallery in Angel opens on February 26 with pieces made as he slept.
Will Mackrell’s Sleep, 2013
Will placed carbon paper sheets under his bed sheets to create two works Sleep -negative- and Sleep -positive-, his every movement that night was captured, resulting in two inky self-portraits.
“I started using everyday materials and I liked the idea of still making work while not in the studio,” he said. “I got A3 sheets of carbon paper joined together with archival tape. I’m curious about restlessness at night, churning through ideas. My body is still thinking and moving – I’m as active as the day. It’s like an X-ray and a fossilised trace of my night’s sleep.”
The results display a hectic maze of mark making – the flimsy material is torn and scratched in places, the imprint of fingertips is obvious.
Will was inspired by Andy Warhol’s 1963 film Sleep in which he filmed close friend John Giorno for five hours and 20 minutes. He is therefore proud to pick up on any cinematic aspects in the work and describes the two positive and negative prints as “long exposures”.
Soprano Stephanie Lloyd will be performing on the opening night, singing Soprano for Sleep Time App, a musical version of Will’s sleep patterns; a piece he describes as a “working diagram”.
Will used an iPad sleep app under his pillow to record his sleep patterns; the data was translated into notation form and a recording will be available to hear during the exhibition.
This isn’t the last of the sleep pieces, Will plans to engage with people who have sleep disorders and create more “fossilised traces”.
“I’ve often struggled with my sleep, it’s quite disrupted and I am curious to know what’s going on,” he said.
“I’m always thinking about not wanting to lose time, I see sleep as much a time of work as day. My interest is not so much the excess of restlessness but trying to find ways to use materials, to have a language with sleep time.”
• Touch & Go runs from February 26-April 2 at William Benington Gallery, 20 Arlington Way, EC1R 1UY. 020 3659 5818, www.williambeningtongallery.co.uk
Romantic ideals, red telephone boxes and bondage masks combine in The Casque, latest exhibition at James Freeman gallery, Upper Street. Claire Partington’s triptych ‘The More We Are Together’ takes Van Eyck's Arnolfini portrait and rebuilds the scenario but the delicate ceramic craftwork almost cloaks the joke at play. The instantly recognizable figures include merchant Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini, matter-of-factly holding out hotel keys to two socialites replete with small yappy dogs at their heels.
Her exquisite earthenware figures display an unusual level of detail; painted braiding, transfers of intricate patterns, even tendons are visible on the figure’s hands.
Her other pieces on show, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, 2014, boast interchangeable heads. They are a jumble of folklore, myth, contemporary fashion, Velasquez paintings and the Goldilocks fairytale. Beneath the man’s starched collar is the Cross of Santiago emblazoned over by a floral Nike tick, possibly commenting on the ubiquitous nature of branding.
Their human heads can be swapped for those of glazed black bears based on 18th century English salt glaze designs found on sugar pots and milk jugs. The historical attention is driven by Partington’s vast experience of handling ceramic collections from her work at the V&A and British Museum.
There’s an eerie moment when gallerist James Freeman adjusts the heads, as we turn away and there’s a sudden rattle. Unfazed, he quips “Don’t worry, she’s just settling herself in”.
Two painters, Paula Kane and Nicolas Freytag, accompany the sculptures. Both are interested in collapsing time and place to create layered fictions that challenge historical clichés. Kane’s Arcadian landscapes take all the tropes expected in idealized rural views, the rolling hills, tricking lakes and winding paths are uncanny in their unnatural patchwork. While Freytag’s work drips with clashing references, La Vivisection ou l'Aube de la Transparence, 2014,includes a Holbein skull, Napoleonic hat, Marie Antoinette-style dress, blue rubber gloves and a bondage mask all contained within a frame on drafting film - the effect is dirty, streaky and semi transparent.
“The idea was to show artists that use historical references to create something very contemporary,” explains James. “Work that reminds us any human achievement is a combination between high aspirations and base desires.”
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