Deborah True Matias Viegener, Dave Burns & Austin Young Peter Bond Ayssar Arida Johnny Golding
Rosa Ainley Philippa Beale Helen Kerwan & Jane Madsen Eileen Simpson Sarah Ross
Up From The Country - An artist's journey to the city
Philippa Beale Tuesday, January 25, 2005
'Baby Love' (instalation View) (click for larger image)
On the 17 th January 1946, when I was born of Yorkshire parents in an old theatre in Winchester, the constellation of Capricorn was rising in the west, and the sun, its Lord, was hidden by the shadows of the darkest clouds, it was one of the coldest winters in living history and destined to be inspirational. Driven by this constellation, my life has been spent travelling from the provinces to the city and on arrival planning further journeys from A to B and back again. Continual movement is inevitable for the Capricorn and its partner in mythology, the God Pan, who was placed in the heavens by Zeus, in recognition of the help Pan had given Zeus, enabling Zeus' journey across the solar system. Those born under the sign of Capricorn must assume the role of Jason, traveller and warrior, who continually strove against insurmountable odds working persistently towards his inevitable goal.
Wrapped in a skin of seeming indifference, I advance tentatively towards the horizon. The charms and warmth of the Sun God urge me on; my senses are stimulated and while I rarely value the importance of the achievements that are made by me on route to my ambition, I do tend to conceal myself, skilled in the act of deception and of convincing the people around me that I am content and know my place. I, in fact, live in a world of dreams because in this state I am in a position to protect myself from the cruelty I see in the world around me.
Part of the tour of 18 th century strolling players, the old theatre in Jewry Street, was always on the edge of society; actors and Jews being collected together on the outskirts of the Cathedral City of Winchester. Here stability reigned in, the ancient capital of England, built in landscape that still showed remnants of its Palaeolithic forbears.
Jane Austen, Winchester's most famous daughter, rarely travelled she was known and even celebrated for her lack of movement. In her great political novel 'Mansfield Park', the virtue of its heroine, Fanny Price, is that she stays still opposing change, prefering ethics to innovation.
My father was a gun maker, he crafted them 'lock, stock and barrel' and sold them at a good price to local gentry, of which there were many. He was a gentleman with old-fashioned charm, who had travelled to India, in pursuit of excellence, to work for Joseph Manton of Calcutta. He arrived in Winchester after years of travelling with a very young wife, to settle and raise a family. I, his middle child and first daughter, grew up as the 'apple of his eye', he spun dreams and tales for me while he should have been constructing bespoke guns for the 'county set'.
In fact it was during these imaginary adventures that I first heard of the great outside, the real large cities of London and Birmingham, where my father's mainly imaginary guns were, on enquiry, being inspected at the 'proof house'. How abused these great institutions were in pursuit of the education of my imagination!
Baby Love (click for larger image)
This was a world of Indian rope tricks, (a single long hair pulled from a fair haired plat will remain upright if held above the draft of a brazier) and cowboys, whose presence was felt by their pistols, kept lying around on workbenches, of Wild Bill Hickock and Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, seen by my father in his youth. Inhabiting this world meant that the future for me lay in being a professional woman or a lady gun maker, never to marry, have children and never be dragged down by societies expectations of what I should do. In this little town dominated by its Cathedral, where the buildings were mainly mean and pretentious, the old theatre stood opposite the old gaol and was linked together by tunnels under the road. In this environment I underwent the light wounds of early youth, from here came the indelible memory that 'to voyage' whether in the mind or reality was the spice of life.
It is the memories of early journeys in the 1950's which continue to haunt and torment the dreams of my later life as I hurry from city to city, country to city, city to country and back again. Dreams of multicoloured lights which were rare in post war Britain, and of road trips to Leeds, on the back seat, of large old cars, with running boards wrapped up against the cold in an old army blanket. These images combined with all the machinery in my father's workshop, engraving tools, dividers, drawing boards, all instruments for documenting space and time still torment me. A place where the floorboards of his workshop became the planks of the boat by which father and I travelled to imaginary destinations, more sophisticated and salubrious than where we found ourselves at the time.
The workshop let me into unforgettable secrets, I uncovered old sea chests and found paintings of imaginary cities, all of which were necessary to dream a journey into unknown places. These experiences of my youth were to me the gnosis of art. I still keep the child-like pride of an explorer, which at times makes me appear rather secretive or morose , making it difficult for outsiders to penetrate my private world.
Under the influence of my mother, who survived my father by at least twenty years, I actually travelled to cities across the world. Travelling or planning to travel gives a clear portrait of my mother. Looking at us with stern intelligence, she essayed to take her children by bus, train and plane to distant cities across Europe and beyond. Early on, I had drawing lessons in Athens, stopping over in Munich to look at the remains of Fascist art, littering the galleries and museums. I was however, as much influenced by the Singer Sewing Machine signs, eagerly looked for on my annual visit to Leeds as I was by the 'Mona Lisa' in Paris or the 'Night Watch' in Amsterdam, I came not only to know the works of Nietzsche, but also read Erasmus and Plato or any great name known to be related to the city to be visited. All this precious reading came to an end in 1964 on discovering men on a visit to Rome or rather men discovering me! A true and complete autobiography is revealed in my work comprising so many journeys, real and imaginary, intellectual and remembered. Documented journeys from Woolloomooloo in Sydney N.S.W to Coolangata, Queensland. The passage of time of the circle of life, death and re-birth, all connected by a year in an apple orchard. The journey through female sexuality in 'Red Shoes', 'Rough and Smooth', 'Baby Love', 'Past Her Sell By Date' and 'Obscure Objects of Desire' (see images) have made me concentrate on a quasi-visible style which incorporates text to result in work that unites the present with the past.
'Red Shoes' (click for larger image)
'Red Shoes' (click for larger image)
'Rough and Smooth' (click for larger image)
'Past her sell by date' (click for larger images)
'Obscure Objects of Desire' (click for larger image)
'Obscure Objects of Desire' (click for larger image)
Uniting antique and modern imagery is a conjunction I have achieved thanks to the arbitrary mixture of theatrical properties I have seen in the world's great cities, whether at the Opera in Vienna or the Temples in Kuala Lumpur. Plaster casts, latex moulds, models, wigged heads, mannequins, create unique works that document journeys I have made to many irresistible cities.
I spent my school years in Brussels then proceeded to live in Lisbon and then Sydney, Australia. I often visited Barcelona and Bilbao when working as a purser in the Merchant Navy. However it was to London I aspired, and it is in London where I found the form of expression suited to my need to move from place to place. After 1974, I settled in Camberwell where I produced works documenting previous journeys from ' Woolloomooloo to Tea Gardens' and 'Pelican at Coolangata ' and my best-known work ' Baby Love' (see images.)
From my friendship with Liz McQuiston (another voyager from Pennsylvania) I learnt how to combine text and image particularly those revealed on the highways and roads, which we travelled. Billboards and advertising images became the metaphor for movement. These survived my interest for a relatively short time. Although in South London I remain one of the predominant interpreters of this now dated art form, as I appear in the book 'Graphic Agitations' by Liz (1).
(click for larger image)
Today I am struck by the relationship of certain signs which appear in artists work, which quite literally refer to the advertising and signage of big cities - Mark Titchener's electronic signs are of course pre-dated thirty years by David Troostwyk's electronic moving signs, still used at railway stations, details of this work can be seen in 'Private Act' by Troostwyk and others published in association with Matts Gallery (2) . It is a kind of hieroglyphic text, which one must know how to interpret if one wants to understand what breadth of experience and excitements the city has to offer. The pandemonium of lights on hoardings in Times Square or Piccadilly conjures up ghosts from my childhood when I travelled from the darkness of the country to the lights and excitement of the city. And while I haven't been able to banish the impact of the Second World War from my work, (it isn't an accident that 'modernism' led to 'minimalism' in a period of shortage and deprivation), it is because I am faithful to an inner and imperious necessity to explain the truth, and my journeys by which my work is entirely dominated.
What then are these signs grouped in so varied a manner that bedecks great cities? They are the documents, the history of our development, they suggest and lead back to the first mark makers, hand prints in the mud and pressed onto the cave wall, saying, "I was here". They belong to no particular ideology and have expressed many. Graffiti of early Christians still decorates the walls of the catacombs In Rome. Signs light up the changing currents of thoughts and philosophies of our time. Are not arcades and porticos of today that have been covered in graffiti and images similar to those found on the walls and frescos of Pompeii? Baudrilliard has already explained ' simulacra ' and its relationship to time and culture. Both now and in the past it has always been the commercial artist who decorated the public spaces of big cities for the enjoyment of hoi polloi. The major artists, from Leonardo and Michelangelo to Damien Hirst, are all inside museums.
Out on the street, mankind is scarcely represented except by shop dummies with their super human beauty. These dummies are secret objects of fear, frightening but also attractive, they have fascinated many 20 th Century artists; De Chirico's paintings are littered with dressmaker's dummies relics from remembered childhood in his father tailor's workshop in Athens.
Often the characters shown in cityscapes are deep manifestations of the artist's own psyche as in Lowery's, Manchester and Hopper's, New York. The 'Tower' and 'Locomotive', the ' Labyrinth of streets and lights of arcades ' (see images) appear in so many artists work, which are really far more moved by the urban than the country. Constable and Turner finished their paintings in city studios.
Towers remind us of Babylon influenced by Freudian interpretation they symbolise male assertion; as with the tower at Canary Wharf, the Post Office tower and many other towers in cities across the world. Was part of the American grief and anger about the 'Twin Towers' because their twin male assertions had been obliterated? Was Tatlin's tower, looking so like an oil rig and never made or erected in his lifetime, really about male supremacy?
All of my plaster casts are of ghosts of things that relate to objects hewn, or implanted, but always controlled by men. The steel, electricity and construction, which create a city, are quite literally 'man-made'. However the wall on which I hang my casts of 'man-made' objects, symbolises the protective aspect (even a restraining protection), the very modern prototype of the nest and the love of a mother for her children.
In the city, real brick and concrete walls, the doors only opened through negotiation to allow the spectator to enter and view, always separating the spectator and the artist. The train travelling from suburb to city, is always travelling towards liberty passing the free art galleries of graffiti, commercial hoarding and signs that are for us all. At times of celebration, particularly Christmas and New Year, the gaily bedecked and be flagged cities, symbolise further that city dwellers have freedom from darkness and freedom to 'sortie' through the night.... being able to see somewhere to go!
It is in cities where ideas are exchanged and mutual influences described. Dali and Max Ernst as part of 'futurism' played endless games with 'cityscapes'. It is also necessary to speak of the 'man chinos' that Carlo Carra produced intimating the future automata which would service the city; the banker, the ticket collector, the sweet and coffee vendor have all fulfilled the futurist dream.
Today, in order to create at all costs something strange and unusual, it is the fashion to make the 'living dead', to show autopsy, mixing together the organic and the in organic, to assemble extraordinary contrasts in such a way as to force the spectator to make an imaginary restoration. The purpose is to make 'absurdity' represent a connecting link, between scarcely tangible ideas by merely providing a riddle for the spectator to guess at. The results of which seem to be of no importance, may bring the riddle to life. This is of course the formula of surrealism and particularly applies to contemporary art in the Saatchi collection.
This definition cannot be used in my own case nor can I be judged by this current impetus. I engage my viewers to join my endeavours and to become part of my journey. To join the Argonauts, with this Jason-like artist voyaging around her inner being. A journey without the consolation of religion, outside that domain where one can take refuge in grace, I hide and become secretive, alone in the city.
(1) Graphic Agitations, Liz McQuiston, , Phaidon Press, July 1995, 0714828785
(2) Private Act , David Troostwyk , Stephen Bury , Robin Klassnik, Matt's Gallery, June 1999, 090762331X
Philippa Beale
I started in the 1960s taking photographs and making casts amidst the orthodoxy that was modernism and have it difficult to come to terms with the post-modernist view that I can do what I want. My photographs have at last begun to look like snap shots and my casts have literally become the evidence of moments in time. When young I was very shy and went into art to tell the stories that I felt I didn't have the ability to write; now I just hint at the stories and leave the audience to 'fill in the gaps' or make up the dialogue using their own imagination.
Critics have said that I have documented female sexuality and family politics but really my work is about a little girl who grew up, got married, had children, worked hard, grew old, started to die and kept a visual diary of what interested her.
