matchbox rizla drawings

EAST POP RED Exhibition and Performance

2011-10-11T11:42:00.025+01:00

I am showing two paintings in EAST POP RED, an exhibition at Red Gallery, following on from the EAST POP WEST exhibition. I will also be doing a performance with Marco, the second part of our 'Pins and Needles' East-West performance, which began in West London. Details below.

Not No Un (She Is Not Being Moved)

The opening night is on Tuesday 11th October 2011, from 6pm - 9pm.

The exhibition is open from Wednesday 12th October to Tuesday 18th October, from 11am to 8pm.

PINS AND NEEDLES, PART 2 - EAST

'Pins and Needles' performance will take place in the gallery from approximately 6pm on Thursday 13th October.

Red Gallery
3 Rivington Street
London
EC2A 3DT

Nearest tube stations are Old Street and Shoreditch High Street.

More information on the Red Gallery and Eastpop websites

Details of the previous exhibition, EAST POP WEST, and the first part of my and Marco's performance Pins and Needles - West, are in the posts below.

Pins and Needles - West

2011-10-11T11:00:00.003+01:00

Pins and Needles performance with Marco, Saturday 1st October 2011, for East Pop West.

Photo (above) by Anastasia Albertiné Sakoilska

Photo (above) by Anastasia Albertiné Sakoilska

East Pop West / Not No Un / Pins and Needles

2011-10-01T12:57:00.012+01:00

I will be doing a performance with Marco at 7.30pm on Saturday 1st October 2011, as part of the East Pop West event. Our performance is called Pins and Needles.

I am showing two new paintings in the exhibition; together they are called Not No Un (She Is Not Being Moved).

East Pop West is open from Friday 30th September to Sunday 2nd October,
12 noon - 10pm.

Admission price £5 / £3 concessions

East Pop West
Unit 1
Goldhawk Industrial Estate
Vinery Way (off Brackenbury Road)
London
W6 0BE

Nearest Tube is Shepherd's Bush (Central Line).
Vinery Way is a 10 / 15 minute walk down Goldhawk Road (on the left).

More information on the East Pop West website.

NOT NO UN / SEXY100 PICTURES

2011-09-20T21:52:00.032+01:00

NOT NO UN, my installation of nine paintings for the exhibition SEXY100.

SEXY100 is a group exhibition of 100 artists at 'wall to wall', a temporary space in an old office block, that's usually a makeshift warehouse for a food re-distribution charity. As well as three open-plan floors, dingily-officey-carpeted, the building has many small cubicle-style rooms, with sliding doors, louvred blinds, dusty shelves and office detritus. I made my installation, NOT NO UN, in one of these small rooms, creating nine new paintings to fit in the space of three wall-mounted shelves (dust left in-tact). I also created a tenth, related, painting, 'SHE IS NOT BEING MOVED (RED)', which was hung on the top floor amongst work by other artists. Each painting is 10 X 12 inches, in acrylic paint.

The exhibition is at:
'wall to wall',
8 - 9 Spring Place,
Kentish Town
London

SEXY100 is open from 9th to 30th September 2011, daily by appointment.
Call 07587 454 613 or email stimulusltdworldtour.co.uk.

More information about the exhibition and the curators, Stimulus Ltd, can be found at BIG DEAL and Stimulus Ltd websites. The invitation and map are on my previous blog post, below.

TASTE
BEGIN AGAIN
NOT NO UN
ALL THE TIME
ALL OVER
COUNT
ONE BUCKET PEAS
SHE IS NOT BEING MOVED
DISAPPEAR DOT

SHE IS NOT BEING MOVED (RED)

BIG DEAL SEXY100

2011-09-05T11:57:00.011+01:00

I am showing ten new paintings in the exhibition BIG DEAL SEXY100, curated by Stimulus Ltd. The private view is on Thursday 8th September 2011, from 5pm until 9pm, with performances and work by 100 artists. The exhibition is at wall to wall, 8-9 Spring Place, London N5. It's a ten minute walk from Kentish Town tube on the Northern Line.

Here are links to BIG DEAL and Stimulus Ltd websites.

Wrapping: Sun and Moon Performance

2011-07-07T11:59:00.001+01:00

Tin foil and crumpled flag, after the performance

On Saturday April 23rd 2011 I did a performance with Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly as The Sun and Moon. We were invited to perform by Micalef, for the final event of his exhibition The Wine Presses of Luvah. The event, at the Freedom Bookshop gallery, Whitechapel, was the third during Micalef’s exhibition, where he read his new Blake poems, and hosted various performances, including The Hoova of Luvah. Micalef added new poems for each event, which were based on things that happened in the previous readings and performances.

Micalef’s request/instructions/suggestions for our performance were only that Marco would be the Moon and I would be the Sun ('wear something diaphanous'), and that we 'do something about Blake's Albion'. Marco suggested we buy lots of tin foil – we decided on two large, wide rolls – and use two balls of grey wool; he suggested I wear yellow. We found nothing suitable and yellow in the charity shop, so Marco brought a yellow T-shirt of his own, with a mythological print on the front and back, for me to wear over my green dress. I wore my hair – which is long and yellow-ish – down. Marco brought a silver suit, trimmed with gold, for himself, and wore gold trainers with it. We changed into our costumes in the tiny toilet underneath the Freedom Bookshop gallery.

It was unseasonably hot weather on the Easter weekend, weather for shorts and dresses. At the event both Calum and John had arrived in shorts and intense, bright yellow T-shirts. This was coincidental, and not part of the exhibition, but perhaps the same awareness of energy and heat had prompted their choice of clothing as informed ours in the performance.

Micalef read a set of three Blake poems, after which we began our performance. There was already a large and worn Union Jack lying on the gallery floor. In a previous performance Marco had lain under it as Albion, with a horn held erect like a giant penis, sleeping and then rousing. This was referred to in one of Micalef’s subsequent poems. I began our performance by taking the flag and carefully folding it into a neat pile, placing it back on the floor. As I did this, the small but noisy audience paid little or no attention, continuing to talk and to encourage a dog to scamper around noisily on the wooden floor-boards right beside me. Marco felt afterwards that he liked the way people kept talking at the beginning, but also found it sexist – they talked as I folded, but when he arrived in the performance they began to watch and be quiet. Perhaps it appeared I was just tidying up for Marco. I felt the tension and ambiguity of performing, unnoticed, wondering ‘when will people realize we’ve begun?’, and the gradual focussing of attention on our activities. There was a juncture between being there ‘just doing’, and ‘performing’. I thought, as I folded the flag, of the women in the launderette folding sheets, and of times with my mother, folding sheets, ‘me to you and you to me’. The lack of attention - or respect? – for this part of the performance seems consistent with the quiet invisibility of such tasks. The folding was a preparation, a preparatory meditation, a clearing away before a beginning, and an allusion to bed-making (itself entwined with the cycles of day and night, sun and moon).

When the flag was folded, Marco walked over to me, in his thick, wool, shiny silver suit, and I helped him to sit on the floor. He sat with his legs straight, outstretched, and his back vertical, forming a right angle, parallel to the wall. He sat extremely still. I took one of the rolls of tin foil, which I had been holding like a wand, and began to unwind it, wrapping it around Marco’s head. His head was recently shaved and so as I wrapped it in foil I could press the thin metal directly on to both his skull and face. As I did so I thought of the lampshades I make at home by wrapping my own head in foil to form a lampshade-like shape, and a residue of my facial features, which then hangs from the ceiling, shedding out light. I was careful to press gently but firmly onto the foil to capture Marco’s head without hurting him. I felt I was looking for his features, looking for and making the ‘Man in the Moon’. Marco said afterwards it felt very caring, as I pressed the foil to his face.

I began to wrap the foil further down, towards Marco’s neck. I wrapped by circling him, moving my whole body around him, orbiting. As I wound myself and the foil around him, concealing his neck, and shoulders, I followed my progress by unwinding a ball of soft, grey wool, binding and tying it over the foil, holding the shape in place. Marco said this part of the process felt precarious at times, that the foil ‘case’ might slip off, or burst apart. It would have spoiled the effect if bits of the moon had broken off. Breaking the illusion – however nursery rhyme-like or absurd the illusion was – would undermine the potency of the performance, the ritual. The precariousness of the ‘encasing’ demanded my focussed attention and careful application of pressure, a certain amount of balance and quick dexterity to get the 'moon’ wrapped up. It was important to entirely encase Marco, to make a solid and complete shape of him – to transform him into a shape, an object, but an abstract entity too. I felt as I wound and bound him that I was making something precious that could be broken – the ‘object moon’ and the ‘idea moon’.

It was such a hot evening that as I circled round Marco, bent over doing it, I began to feel light-headed and a little dizzy, over-heating slightly. Marco, I realized, inside a thick suit and an ever-growing tight foil casing, must be starting to sweat, heating up with the radiating, reflecting, intensification of the foil. His whole head was entombed, his mouth and nostrils covered. I hoped he could breathe ok.

I encased Marco’s torso, with his arms strapped to his sides, with swathes of foil. I tied him up with more wool. Then I put one hand on his back, and one under his legs, stretched out on the floor still, and guided him backwards to lie on his back. As he tipped back he retained the ‘L’ shape, his legs rising up into the air, to form the inverse ‘L’, or almost-crescent shape. The movement was comical, absurd – a ‘tipping up’, as Marco said afterwards. The cartoon-ish-ness of this movement suited the foil ‘moon’ we were making. I began to complete the crescent, this time winding the foil from the top of Marco’s gold toes downwards to his belly. Part way through this process I heard a muffled sound from his foil-head which made me aware that he was overheating and struggling to breathe. I poked a hole through the foil, where I guessed his mouth was, for him to breathe better and steam to escape.

Time was pressing, with the audience’s short attention span, the heat, and Marco starting to steam inside the foil and his legs becoming exhausted – ‘it was like being at the gym’, he commented about the legs-aloft posture afterwards. Marco was blind for the duration, his eyes enclosed in foil, his hearing similarly muffled, suffering a strange sensory deprivation combined with sensory-intensification, of the heat and posture. There was finite time to complete the moon wrapping. Timing was all important; duration was palpable, emphasized by the condition of heat and tiredness, energy manifested. I thought of the cycles of sun and moon, imagining the sun as having tasks, tasks to achieve before night, preparations to complete, routines that must be performed and punctual. The darkness dependant on the energy of the light. The formation of rituals by the intertwining of light and dark. Marco said afterwards that I was dancing round him like a maypole, as I wound him with foil. It had felt like an abstracted, dance-like ritual.

Marco, his back flat to the ground, his legs outstretched, was now entirely encased in foil. His body became an object – a crescent, a silver-moon-crescent. An absurd toy, improvised moon. Man in the moon. I took hold of his legs and guided them to the floor, stretching him out flat, almost feeling like I was breaking him in half. No longer the moon crescent, now a body, a 'mummy', a light and heat emitting presence. John said it felt as if Marco was emitting radioactivity, that the audience should be protected from the energy – that the foil was to protect the audience from radioactivity, like a special suit. I was conscious of Marco and my heat, from the activity, the circling, the wrapping, the reflectivity. I had the impression of a piece of salmon or meat wrapped for baking. Geraldine commented that ‘You trussed him up like a kipper’.

Once Marco was stretched out I took the folded flag and shook it out, like shaking a blanket or duvet. I laid it over him like a bed cover. I felt I was putting the moon to bed, completing a point in a cycle. The moon going in. I felt caring, patient, protective. I sat at his feet, crouched, like at the foot of a bed – watching, guarding, paused, waiting. Though the pause was brief – necessarily as Marco was too hot and the audience distractable – my moment crouched at the foot of the moon was a clear, weighted punctuation.

I rose from my post and pulled the flag-cover from the sleeping moon and cast it aside. Then, I held up Marco’s legs back into a crescent and began quickly to unwrap them. I roughly unwound the wool binding, tangled, and tore off shards of foil, ripping and scattering them like sun-moon-light across the floor. I held his legs, revealed now to the innard of silver and gold suit and gold trainers, and pushed the legs down as I guided his body up to sitting, into the ‘L’ shape, his torso still wrapped. I continued the reverse process, of unwrapping, tearing the foil from his body, feeling the heat beating out. When I pulled the last pieces from around Marco’s head, his face emerged, red and streaming with sweat, having endured the intense reflective heat, basted inside the foil shell and in the thick wool suit. He was the heat emitting core. I squeezed and gently shook his shoulder to ‘wake’ the moon, a gesture of ‘time to get up’. He opened his eyes, and I helped him to his feet, the silver core now animate, amidst the scattered foil shards.

More crumpled foil and flag, after the performance

The performance ‘proper’ came to an end here, but after a minute or so I returned and began to gather the foil shards and compress them into a ball, in a gesture of tidying. Marco joined me, scavenging on the floor for foil, to create a huge sphere of foil, a ‘full moon’, from the remnants of the performance. The foil-moon-ball was later placed, by Marco, on top of one of Micalef’s sculptures, to become a final element in the sculpture, a full moon hovering above a Loovah-lampshade.

The foil-moon on top of Micalef's Loovah-Lampshade sculpture

To read about other performances I've done, including more with Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly, please click here.

AISLE Performance

2011-02-14T15:36:00.009Z

As part of GHost III, an evening of performance and film in St. John's Church, Bethnal Green, Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly and I created AISLE, a ten minute performance resonating with ideas of penance, pilgrimage and ritual. Ghost III took place from 6pm to 10pm on Friday 17th December 2010, organized by Sarah Sparkes and Ricarda Vidal.

View inside St. John's Church, Bethnal Green, looking towards the altar end of the church. Taken during the rehearsal for AISLE - you can just see the blurred crawling figures near the white screen.

The dark pews in the dimly lit church interior for the AISLE performance.

The lights in the church were low, the pews dim, so that their occupants were barely distinguishable. The aisle of the church was comparatively more illuminated, its flattened well-worn pink-red carpet singled out by the lighting as the one route through the church. As the audience mumbled and rustled, after the previous performance ended and whilst waiting for ours to begin, Marco and I made our separate ways from where we had been sitting to the top of the aisle. We knelt down and began to untie our shoe laces. We took off our shoes, and then our socks. Our naked feet indicated the beginning of a ritual, with a sense of awe or respect for the forthcoming actions; coupled with intimations of a dance; and suggestions of insanity and deprivation. Observing shoeless people I notice that they are perceived as the abject, the utterly vulnerable, the insane. On the occasions I’ve removed my shoes in public I’ve been met with concern and consternation. Perhaps looking comfortably hippy-ish or high-heeled exhausted mitigates against this – but as an otherwise-outwardly-normal person shoelessness is a breach of sanity and comprehensibility. In our performance we wanted to evoke the ritual and niceties of religious and other ceremonies where shoe removal is involved - outside a house or a temple, in a newly carpeted home – suggesting reverence, occasion, respect – but to destabilize these ideas during the performance. We wanted to unsettle readings of our rationale, to make interpretation awkward. Bare, naked feet felt liberating, comfortable, practical. It was a route into closeness with the ground and integration with our movements – and a nod to nakedness. Our bare-footedness was carefully planned, yet it went barely noticed at first.

Kneeling to remove shoes at the start of the aisle.

Ghost-blur kneeling to remove shoes.

Starting to crawl.

From our bare-foot-kneeling position we lowered our whole bodies onto the ground and stretched out our arms before us, prostrated. We began to slither-crawl forward. The moment of transition from not-crawling to crawling had the sensation of diving into a swimming pool; of being on a clear and significant threshold - a sensation which was familiar from previous crawl performances. We had done a practice crawl at my studio a few days earlier, where we used the hallway, at the end of a long corridor. The floor is stone, or concrete, and was freezing. We slid side by side on our bellies in the narrow space, negotiating our movements and interactions. The cold slammed into our stomachs, my top riding up so that my belly and midriff were directly in contact with the freezing surface. When we arrived at the church to rehearse on the day of the performance we saw that the aisle was carpeted, and I had a sense of almost-guilt, that the crawl would be so much more comfortable and warm than I had expected and intended. Yet, during that rehearsal we were responded to with the comment ‘You must have done something really awful to have to do that much penance!’ So the resonance of pain and suffering seemed still to be present.

The carpet of the aisle, ant's-eye view. And ghost-blurred crawling figures.

The screen at the end of the aisle, with two 'will o' the wisp' lights, which we are crawling towards. Crawlers'-eye-view.

When we began our AISLE crawl, the audience, attuned perhaps to vertical or louder events, carried on chatting and drinking and glancing around for the first few moments where we silently, subtly moved. Our crawl was a belly-flat-to-the-floor type of crawl, dragging ourselves along with outstretched arms. We moved towards the altar, slowly, painfully, painstakingly. Whilst we crawled, from above our heads on the balcony, a choir began to sing a repeated refrain of ‘again and again and again and...’ As each phrase was fading out a solo voice emerged from the opposite balcony to respond with another refrain of ‘again and again and again...’ the single and multiple calls merging, overlapping and pulling each other onwards. The music was mantra-like, enigmatic, ambiguous, but insistent. It was gentle and soothing in the tone of the voices, yet its cyclical and unceasing nature carried an element of threat and desperation, of compulsion and castigation. ‘Again’, a word which was embodied in its performance - an ‘onomatopoeic’ singing. Again, a word which I have repeatedly painted and drawn, on tissues, rizlas, canvas, and which Marco has sung in the lyrics of Rex Nemo songs. A word we have both pondered, and returned to; repetition, repetition, repetition. Again: I think of compulsion, addiction, meditation, repetition, history, pattern, inscription. As the ‘again’ refrain began, eyes were drawn around the church, and to the lit aisle with our crawling bodies, and our presence dawned on the audience.

Crawling.

Crawling heads down.

Crawling head up.

There was silence from the audience as we dragged ourselves forward. Marco pulled himself forward with his fists clenched, his legs a dead weight; tiring, he sighed and groaned at the effort, communicated visually and audibly. His body clad in lighter-coloured clothes than mine, and his accompanying sounds, drew attention to his figure, dominating the dual-crawl. I wore dark clothes, contrasting to Marco’s in colour, but similarly normal everyday type of clothing, baggy trousers and jumper, so that our crawl appeared perhaps spontaneous, part of the everyday world. I crawled differently - silently, smoothly, stretching out my arms and fingers, clawing into the carpet, dragging myself, legs slightly bent to give a little propulsion. I felt lost and contained within the world of crawling, the slithering movement, the sensation of the floor against my stomach, tops of my feet and palms. The visual and stylistic contrast emphasized the difference between the two crawlers – unified in an activity, a purpose, but possibly in competition, or negotiation.

Crawling down the aisle.

Our movements were low to the ground, an inversion or perversion of a conventional procession/perambulation down the aisle. I was aware of the history of processions along the aisle – the routine church services, communions, marriages and funerals that take place there - and of our laying our own ritual over these, our intervention in ritual. As a crawling couple perhaps we prompted thoughts of Adam and Eve, and the serpent, forever crawling and eating the dust – an image of conflated Christian mythology, contorting ideas of sin and shame and temptation into an ambiguous and malleable spectacle. Pilgrimages and penitent journeys which process hand and knee through villages and towns, streets and floors, to end in the church, echoed through the crawl – events of endurance and tradition in some places, but which are unfamiliar in Bethnal Green. Mexican and Polish friends pointed out these histories to me, after previous crawling performances, though the impulse to crawl, for me, came from somewhere internal and unorganized – perhaps informed, osmotically, by centuries of others’ crawls? Our crawl necessitated the audience to suppose their own idea of our purpose. Ahead of us, at the altar end of the aisle there was a large white screen on which two tiny ‘will o’ the wisp’ lights were roaming, flitting, searching. We moved towards these - drawn, beckoned, impelled, seeking, the lights giving a logic and object to our movements. ‘Never underestimate the power of ritual,’ Marco had said to me some time before we made the performance, words which continue to turn over in my mind.

Crawling towards the table-obstacle.

Our crawl had been intended to be, at times, something of a 'battle' - we would verge across each other's path, tussle, barge. This battle would have its climax in our negotiation of an obstacle placed half way down the aisle – a table covered with a heavy velvet cloth, and a film projector mounted on it. The obstacle occupied half the width of the aisle and, we realized in rehearsal, that from our awkward horizontal positions it would be a case of under or around, one at a time. We decided to use the obstacle to further dramatize our struggle. When we were near to the obstacle Marco got ahead of me. I crawled faster and, there not being space for us both to pass through the gap side by side, I began to pull myself onto Marco’s back. I crawled and dragged myself up his legs, across his back, and slightly kicked in order to get over his head and beyond the obstructed bit of the aisle first. It became something of a race. I felt myself pushing my foot back into Marco’s hand or head, ruthlessly, attempting to ‘win’ - at the same time realizing the playful and sexual connotations of this over-body crawl, with its intimacy and familiarity and entwining. Marco’s passive acceptance of my over-crawl unsettled the gendered idea of competitiveness.

Crawling around the obstacle.

Gail crawling beyond the obstacle.

Hood up.

Gail crawls ahead of Marco.

On the other side of the aisle obstacle Marco’s hood fell over his head, concealing his face, making him appear monk-like. We again crawled side by side, the pace increasing as we saw our destination of the altar nearing. The choir’s refrain had continued to repeat, the lights on the screen continued to flit, and our movement and Marco’s groaning continued too. The build up of repetition in movement and sound, its cycle, progress and yet getting-nowhere-ness, created both tension and meditativeness – a sense of expectation and waiting, and also of being lulled, held, suspended...

Arms outstretched.

Crawling towards the light.

Marco elbows Gail.

Nearly at the altar and screen.

At the end of the aisle, by the altar, screen and lights.

...I arrived first by the altar, dragged myself onto it, still on my belly, and crawled off behind the screen. Marco followed, hauling himself up heavily, legs still unused. We concealed ourselves behind the screen, and listened as the choir’s refrain of ‘again and again …’ faded away. There was a pause, as, we presumed, the audience figured out that the performance had ended. Silence of the audience at the end, after their noise at the start. Then some kind applause, and a shout of ‘Again! Again!’ from someone in the audience. Later, we were asked of the time we spent behind the screen, ‘Were you shagging at the altar? I hoped so.’

Crawling round the corner...

...and onto the altar...

...Marco's feet disappearing...

Music performed by members of the Hackney Secular Choir and Kate Kotcheff.

‘Will o’the wisp’ lights by Sarah Sparkes and Ricarda Vidal.

All photos by Matt Rowe, except last two (below), by Sarah Sparkes.

You can see a short film of AISLE by Sarah Sparkes and Helen Bee on YouTube.

There's more about GHost events on the GHost blog...

...and on the GHost facebook page.

You can read about two previous performances I did involving crawling, 'Dishclout: The Human Duster' and Crawl on these earlier posts...

...and my first collaborative performance with Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly, 'Silent Bell Ringing'.

Here's a link to my AGAIN painting in the exhibition 'East End Promise'.

Rex Nemo & the Psychick Selfdefenders + Hackney Secular Singers play Girls Division and Set Your Spirit Free ...at Supernormal Festival, in this YouTube video.

For GHost II, at St John's Church in 2009, I made Crossbones, a short film of the ephemeral memorials at the unconsecrated graveyard...

...and for GHost Hostings, at Senate House in February 2010, the Reverand Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly gave a sermon-performance - you can see a short film of the sermon here

GHost / AISLE

2010-12-10T17:50:00.013Z

On Friday 17th December I will be doing a performance with Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly, as part of GHost III, an evening of performance and film in St. John's Church, Bethnal Green. AISLE will be a ten minute performance, resonating with ideas of penance, pilgrimage and ritual.

GHost begins at 6pm - with performances from 8pm and films from 8.30pm - and ends at 10pm. More information about GHost and the other artists taking part can be found on the GHost blog. GHost III is curated by Sarah Sparkes and Ricarda Vidal, and is part of an ongoing series of exhibitions and 'hostings.'

GHost III
Friday 17th December, 6pm – 10pm
Performances at 8pm
St. John's Church on Bethnal Green
200 Cambridge Heath Road, E2 9PA - next to Bethnal Green tube.

In 2009 I showed my film Crossbones as part of the GHost II evening. Click here to see more about it

Silent Bell Ringing: ‘Remembrance’ Performance

2010-11-20T21:43:00.019Z

Silent Bell Ringing performance, Gail Burton and Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly. Photo by Geraldine Ryan.

On Saturday 13th November I did a Silent Bell Ringing performance with Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly. The piece was devised for ‘Remembrance,’ a day of performance at Bitchwedge Gallery in response to Remembrance Sunday. Memory and loss are recurrent themes in my work, and in the days before the performance, which Marco had been invited to do, I had returned to a text I wrote after listening to the two minutes silence on Radio 3 last year. My writing observed my struggle to identify silence and to comprehend or accept the process of memory I was being presented with. When Marco asked me to collaborate with him on the Remembrance piece, knowing he had recently bought a bell – a beautiful, old, heavy, mottled metal bell – I suggested we perform a silent bell ringing. Marco added that we could muffle the bell’s clapper with a handkerchief, and we decided I would ‘ring’ the modified bell for two minutes, in a silent bell ringing, while he watched in stillness.

Both my and Marco’s work is concerned, at times, with endurance and repetition, often through physical movement/non-movement, e.g. crawling, staring, sitting. This was our first collaboration, and it brought together some of these interests, along with ideas of memory, memorialization and loss. The elements of the performance emerged spontaneously and naturally, embedding the work in a space of personal resonance. On the morning of the performance we searched for a suitable handkerchief in my flat, finding only two unsuitable ones. A patterned silk one which I had bought at Brompton Cemetery, in a jumble sale, and a white cotton one I was intending to embroider for my grandmother, but on which I had so far only stitched the ‘G’, the rest of her name being written in pencil only. Both were too laden with particularity of association. We cycled to Marco’s flat to collect his studio keys, and on arriving there, I noticed a white cotton handkerchief hanging from the fence by the front door. I pointed to it, and Marco lifted it from its seemingly carefully placed position. We examined the monogram in one corner, discovering it to be a ‘G.’ We then cycled to Dalston, to Marco’s studio, to collect the bell and briefly rehearse our performance.

It was now dark and we needed to hurry, to get to the gallery by ten to six, in order to do our performance at the last minute, before it closed at six. We cycled through Dalston, quick-ish, past the end of Ridley Road Market, with the bell hung from Marco’s bike. It rang intermittently, or rather he rang it, and sometimes it rang itself or bashed his leg, or overbalanced him, particularly on corners. The bell is weighty, loud, sonorous with a high pitch, which cut through the darkness. People on the streets turned to look at the sound. As I cycled behind Marco and the bell, listening and watching, I saw the journey as a procession. I felt like an envoy, a messenger, a ghost.

We arrived outside Netil Market, a small, wall enclosed space at the south end of London Fields. I had never been before. We chained our bikes in the street and carried off the bell. Bitchwedge gallery is a market stall, amongst the other stalls, containing chairs and a heater. When we arrived, just before six, most stalls had packed up, or were in the process of doing so. There were few people around, it was dark and quiet, with a feeling of calm ending. After a few moments, Geraldine Ryan, whose gallery it is, announced our performance and we began.

I held the bell, by a blue rope handle, in my right hand. I walked into the centre of the market place and stood still. It was dark, cold and quiet-ish. A few stalls and customers lingered nearby, with remnants of busy-ness. Marco walked towards me, stopped, and looked into my eyes. He drew from his pocket a white monogrammed handkerchief, knelt before me and began to tie it around the bell’s clapper. I grasped the bell in both hands, tilting it forwards and slightly upwards to expose the inside. I had a sense of physical intimacy through this gesture, of the bell as an almost organ-like or gynaecological space, connecting us in this ‘operation.’ As Marco delicately tied on the handkerchief – a process which I could not see – I thought of the dressing of wounds, and the (myth?) of tying a knot in one’s handkerchief in order to remember something, and of the white handkerchief of surrender. When Marco had finished binding the clapper he rose to his feet, again looked into my eyes, then stepped back and stood still.

I began to swing the bell, making a long arc forward, then back, to move the weighty bell through the air. I articulated my whole body through the bell’s movement, bending my knee, pushing my hip, raising and extending my arm to lift the bell high, then letting its weight pull my arm down again, forcing it behind me in a long arc. I repeated this movement again and again rhythmically, forcefully. The bell did not ring. People in the market stopped to watch and listen to the non-sound. Occasionally a gasp of sound broke from the bell, as some less muffled chink of clapper struck at the bell’s body.

As I swung the bell I felt it as a part of my body, both controlled by me and controlling me. I counted the strokes, impelled to the iteration. The bell dragged on my shoulder. I grew tired, and wondered how long I had been ‘ringing,’ when the two minutes would be up, or if Marco would abandon our plan of a ‘sign’ after two minutes, and hold me here longer, silently ringing till I could continue no more and was exhausted. I felt outside of time, like a cipher, a-historical. I was a clock that did not move forward.

After seventy two strokes I glanced to Marco. He was standing motionless, erect, staring straight at me. He had stood this way throughout the silent ringing, a sentry, a guard. A witness to absence, to almost-silence. Watching stillness-in-motion – my arm’s pendulum movement, repeating, my feet rooted to the ground, the un-clanging-clapper flinging against the bell chamber, the market place of drifting, noise, activity, continuation of routine, ending. Marco stepped back, the sign that two minutes had passed, and I allowed my arm to relinquish the force of ‘ringing,’ and become still.

With Geraldine Ryan, after the performance at Bitchwedge Gallery,in Netil Market, all packing up. More about Bitchwedge Gallery here.

Here is the text which I had been pondering prior to the performance - it's an extract from my book 'Body':

Silence Sounds

Last year I decided to listen to the two minutes silence broadcast on Remembrance Sunday on Radio Three. I heard the chimes of Big Ben at eleven am and then a kind of silence ensued – but it was silence with sounds; sounds like breathing, rustling, and faint echoes, as in the interior of a church where people are actively being silent. I assumed this was the silence. Once I had identified the moment of silence, the beginning of it, my experience was then of an ambiguity over what exactly to do; of how to conduct my silence. The radio announcer had stated that there would now be ‘two minutes silence in remembrance of all those who lost their lives in the first and second world war’…or was it in all conflicts..? Without further instructions I wondered should I try to remember, to recall, specific people, historical people and their actions? or a generalized idea of those people? Should I conjure loss, in an abstracted sense, or perhaps in a personalized way? Or should I imagine the times in which historical loss occurred, its scenes, the conflicts out of which it arose? Should I recall people I have known who fought in war, though they survived? Or should I experience the silence, the emptiness, the absence of sound, the pause of activity? is the intended idea that my two minutes of silence should be an awareness of emptiness, loss and absence?

After this silence – this mentally noisy silence, these few moments elongated by super-awareness of noise and movement and expectation - there were guns, then music. I felt then, at the arrival of these ritual noises, that the time had been so short it could not possibly have been two minutes; it must not have been the silence after all, but just a prelude in the programme; and the silence was still to come. So I listened on, waiting carefully for the real silence. Eventually the radio station resumed its music programme, leaving the Remembrance Service; it was clear then that I had indeed heard the silence as I thought originally. I had spent my silence wondering how to do it, what it was or was supposed to be. Silence sounds.

Kate Kotcheff made a wonderful Remembrance Balaclava for her performance at Bitchwedge Gallery. It reminded me of a couple of my 'Balaclava Women' Rizla Drawings. You can see more of my Balaclava Women drawings here, on some of my older posts.

Dishclout, The Human Duster

2010-11-04T16:00:00.013Z

My 'Dishclout' costume, before and after the performance on Primrose Hill. Photos by Matthew Cowan. And more photos of the procession, by Mat Webber, can be seen on Flickr.

On Hallowe’en, Sunday 31st October 2010, I took part in ‘The Second Annual Disguised Procession.’ It consisted of a group of disguised and costumed artists, musicians and dancers led by Matthew Cowan. The procession began from the top of Primrose Hill at 4.15 pm, moving through the park and nearby streets to end at Cecil Sharp House and the Hallowe’en Music Fair.

I created my costume for the procession entirely from dusters, dish cloths and dirty rags. I processed, and later performed, as 'Dishclout, The Human Duster'. My garment was inspired by my collected pile of old cleaning cloths, and also by the people I’ve seen on the streets dressed in clothing they’ve cobbled together from scraps, rags, plastic bags and other found remnants. These people can be seen on the streets of London, and elsewhere, often ignored, invisible, detoured around – or moved on. They are a locus for our fears of dirt and the abject. Their clothing is an abhorrent and dejected vestment, which manifests and is expressive and absorbent of the deprivations, resources and particularity of the wearer. These ‘dirty people’ make the fissures of society tangible; they and their clothing live in the cracks: for which they are deplored or ignored. I created a persona and costume which took on the role of ‘the dirty,’ in which I literally took on the dirt – confronted it, absorbed it, carried it – I was a vessel for the absorption of dust, filth and distress. My intention was to ‘be the dirty’, but reveal the dirty as the cleanser, as the necessary or inevitable counterpoint to the clean. I appropriated the name ‘Dishclout,’ an old insult for a female servant, as a character who performed a function, a ritual, of accepting dirt, of taking it, revelling in it, of bearing its burden – and of cleansing – a function on behalf of ‘the clean,’ however separate or incomprehensible they might see me as.

I stitched together dozens of yellow dusters, blue jay cloths, white dish cloths and thick white floor cloths to create a dress-come-coat-come-cloak, of draped, striated, folded and layered pieces. Each stitch was a cross, like a suture, a crossing-out, a kiss, or the most basic element in the sewing-mending-making repertoire. I added a head dress, of the same draped cloths, flowing into my shoulders, hanging about my face like a semi-religous or antique costume. A dust mask across my face completed the disguise and held the head dress in place. The garment had arms like wings, wide and flowing, with feathery ends. It was soft, warm and comforting. I thought of the homeless people I’ve seen in their creations, and the rationale of their construction, the living that caused and allowed such garments to come into being, and wondered how the people thought and felt about wearing their clothing.

The procession-proper did not begin until all the disguised participants reached the top of Primrose Hill. But to reach that point we walked from Cecil Sharp House, through the streets and park to the waiting audience. This was an opportunity to inhabit the clean, soft, flowing garment. I walked in time to the ringing of ‘The Bell Man,’ my arm-wings swooshing beside me as I stepped slowly, and enjoyed the anonymity of my entirely concealing costume. I had already been asked ‘Are you a cleaning monster?’ replying ‘No. I am a human duster.’ The procession included a man dressed in a suit covered in bells, even his face; a woman dressed in dead flowers; a trio of female Morris dancers with a gallows held aloft, upon which several Goth-Barbie Dolls were hung; a Knight/Butcher; and a couple in stately Victorian attire with a platter of Black Pudding carried before them...amongst others.

At the top of Primrose Hill is a small round, flat, summit, tarmacced, and edged with muddy puddles and strips of mud, after the recent rain, before the grass begins again and rolls away down the hill. The view looks over all of London, spectacularly laid out before you, with a sense of air and separateness from the city; a perfect place for the Hallowe’en procession to begin. After a couple of performances by other participants of the procession, I began my performance. I walked to the edge of the tarmacced summit and found the first puddle. I dropped to my knees and crawled straight into it. I crawled through it and out the other side. My knees and hands were immediately wet and dirty. I felt the wetness of the dusters and dish cloths as they began to absorb water and dirt, and cling to my body. I noticed the change in temperature as I was exposed to the substances of dirt, the substances close to the ground. Immediately that I began my performance, as I was told later, all the dogs stopped moving and stared at me, then all the people too - wondering what was going on, what was wrong. I crawled a little along the grass, following the circular edge of the summit, and found the next, and deeper, murkier puddle. I realised before plunging in my hands that the dark colour of this puddle would disguise any shit or sharp objects within it; and surely with all these dogs and people there could be all manner of vile content? I placed my hands in, dragged my legs and the wettening costume with me, and squirmed onto my belly, full front into the dirty water. I dragged myself out of the other side, pulling with my hands.

Moving across the grass, I reached an open area of mud, where I dug in my nails and dragged the heavy weight of myself and the soiled costume through the dirt. A man’s boot protruded near my face, and his voice said ‘Lick my filthy boot, you slime.’ I continued. I saw the hill dropping away, and realised the city vista was now to my right. I continued in my circle, glimpsing only feet and catching scraps of sound. I was isolated from the group of the procession and its audience, not knowing if I was watched, unwanted, unseen, ignored or rejected. I was below the level of eyes and engagement, in my own world.

Half way through my performance I began to feel a sense of the weight of dirt, of my dirt, of others’ dirt. The garment was fulfilling its role; it was mopping up, rubbing down, gathering the dust and dirt. And it hurt me, I felt tired and heavy and drained. Yet I also felt a sense of indulgence, of a kind of filth laden ecstasy. I revelled in the freedom to be dirty, to soak it all up. I rolled over, from my front onto my back and onto my front again. I began to enjoy, or if not enjoy, to accept the dirt. My costume flapped and slapped and dragged and clung to me. It was being transformed by the performing process. Its wearing was fulfilling the Dishclout role. I wondered, who am I? What am I underneath? Am I abject? I paused to adjust the head dress, to brush hair and mud from my eye. It was still a dress, and dirty as I was I wanted to look my best. A pair of feet arrived suddenly in view, handing me a small object and saying ‘You dropped this’: my asthma inhaler, secreted in the waistband of my undergarment I had thought. With that gesture I realised – I am a person, not just a garment.

I continued slithering, then more crawling, and found myself at eye level with a crouching photographer. I was aware of the cameras around me, pointing, looking, capturing, and assumed a level of interest and focus upon my actions. It reinforced my sense of separateness: inside the face-covering garment, the layer of grime and weight of wetness, I was hidden, absent perhaps – only the external, the dirt absorbing dress, was present to the world. I completed a circuit of the muddy perimeter of the top of Primrose Hill, inhabiting every movement of the crawl, drag, slither, flap, tangle, dust and clean. I rose to my feet, the garment soiled and heavy with it, draped and clinging to my body, and walked back into the assembled crowd.

The procession then began from Primrose Hill, downwards to Cecil Sharp House. I wanted to whirl and twirl like a dervish, a dusting machine, in my newly transformed dirt-laden-duster-dress. I restrained myself and walked and swished to the clanging of The Bell Man, stepping slowly with the rest of the procession. I wanted also to walk all the way home in my garment, through the city, unknown and unrecognizable, to see how I was seen or unseen. But the wet, cold and weight of the garment drew me to stay at the procession’s destination, Cecil Sharp House, for warmth, hot water and comfort. When I washed I found mud all over the front of my body, right through to my belly, face and finger nails, despite the covering of the costume. I was loath to relinquish the freedom of ‘Dishclout,’ my anonymity and permission to be in the dirt – but felt too the tiredness and strain of bearing the weight of the dirt, and a strong impulse to be clean.

Dishclout, The Human Duster crawled on her hands and knees before slithering on her belly in the puddles and mud around the top of Primrose Hill.

The Bell Man, a performance by Matthew Cowan, took place at the top of Primrose Hill.

The disguised processioners circuited the summit of Primrose Hill, then walked off down the hill in single file.

Photos by Mat Webber

Hallowe'en Disguised Procession

2010-10-28T11:04:00.010+01:00

On Sunday 31st October I will be taking part in 'The Second Annual Disguised Hallowe'en Procession,' beginning from the top of Primrose Hill at 4.15 pm and ending at Cecil Sharp House. The procession will consist of a group of disguised and costumed artists, musicians and dancers led by Matthew Cowan, and will lead to the Hallowe'en Music Fair at Cecil Sharp House.

I will be processing as 'Dishclout, The Human Duster'. I will be wearing a garment made entirely of dusters, dish cloths and dirty rags. The garment is inspired by my collected pile of old cleaning cloths and by the cobbled together clothing of the people who dress in plastic bags, rags and remnants, the dirtiest people who take on the dirt and fall through the cracks.

I will soak up the dirt
Rub it off, wipe it down
I will carry the dust
Dish the must
Miss the dust
Dish the must

Please feel free to come and join the beginning of the procession, in costume if you feel inclined, at 4.15pm (it's the first sunset after the clocks go back).

The procession is free and open to the public. To gain access to the music fair at Cecil Sharp House, you will need a ticket, available via the following websites:

The Wheel: Hallowe'en Music Fair

The ICA

Dishclout*
Over a period of several days I heard and read various reports about an incident where a Member of the European Parliament, Nigel Farage, insulted the President of the European Council. The reports converged on their facts, and did not generally go into great detail or analysis, merely reiterating the same basic points. The reports detailed that Mr Farage was the former leader of the UK Independance Party, and the man he insulted, Herman Van Rompuy, was formerly the Belgian Prime Minister; his nationality being a fact which featured in the specific attacks Mr Farage made. The incident occurred in the Chamber of the European Council on the occasion of the new, and first ever, Permanent President's inaugural appearance.   Mr Farage made a speech in the Chamber to the assembled European Council members during which he directly addressed the President and made a series of personal and political attacks upon him.   This event has been reported as 'an attention grabbing outburst' and an attempt by Mr Farage to get thrown out of the European Parliament, thereby martyring himself and garnering press coverage to raise his profile before standing as an MP in the forthcoming UK general election. Whether or not this is true is unclear, but it was reported that previously Mr Farage had made other outrageous comments in his speaches, which did attract extensive press coverage. Snippets of the speach were replayed on the radio, internet and television, and transcribed in the newspapers. The portion of his speach which particularly caught my attention was the opening tirade, which prefaced a slew of more general and perhaps predictable personal insults and criticisms around Mr Van Rompuy's alleged lack of identity or substance. The insults began thus: 'I don't want to be rude, but really, you have the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low grade bank clerk. And the question that I want to ask, the question that we're all going to ask, is, who are you?'
    A BBC radio correspondent, Jonny Dymond, reported that at this point in the speach there was an audible pause as the numerous interpreters at the council attempted to translate the word 'damp dish rag' into the twenty or so official languages spoken there. Being an unexpected and unorthodox word in that context, and one which did not necessarily have a direct equivalent in every language, this translation took some moments. Having listened carefully, however, to that section of the speach, I cannot hear the phrase 'damp dish rag', nor the pause for translation; what I do hear is the words 'damp rag' and some muffled background noises of possible dissaproval and confusion. I presume that the journalist deliberately creatively mis-reported the phrase and its reception in order to better facilitate his story.   The correspondent used the occurrence as a basis for a lighthearted and mildly humourous investigation of various translations of the phrase - into French, Spanish and Dutch, (taking the opportunity to insult the Dutch language along the way for its unpleasing sound.) His translations, and their lack of complete fit to the English, revealed how the particular cleaning ritual and purpose of a cloth in a particular country frames the word for it - thus in Dutch the translation he offered, and the closest he could find, was for an all purpose cleaning cloth, which would encompass cleaning of the floors. Of course in English no one would use the same cloth - a dish cloth - for cleaning both dishes and floors. And I presume nor would they in the Netherlands; so here is a problem with how to translate the word, or, of how dirt and cleaning is demarcated by language.
    I looked up the translation of dish rag in German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French, Swedish and Dutch; or rather of dish cloth as that was the less exaggerated version of the word, and was the one Mr Dymond seemed to be talking about - and I discovered there are variants of the translations within many languages. These variations are consistent with the slippery idea of what a dish cloth is that the correspondent had highlighted; even in English the meaning of the phrase is open to shifts and misplacement. Interpreting the phrase revealed concepts about the performance of various domestic tasks, how a cloth may be used, whether that equipment merits a name of its own, and which practices have the overtone or common usage of an insult. When I had first listened to the correspondent's story a damp rag had meant a 'dish cloth' to me, but one which, by the subtle alteration of its name, had been made more sullied and limp for the purpose of an insult. I had in mind an ordinary dish cloth, of the kind with which one would 'do the dishes', (somewhat anachonystically, as these days people tend to ‘do the washing up' and use a sponge or a brush of some kind - only the older generation use a dish cloth); I thought too that the word might also, mistakenly, refer to a tea towel for drying the dishes, with which a dish cloth could be confused.   I had been led by the story to interpret damp rag as damp dish rag. Without this prompting I would have understood damp rag as literally a damp rag, and meaning something more along the lines of any cloth used for the purposes of cleaning the kitchen or bathroom, a cloth that is greyed and worn with use, possibly having been cut from a piece of old clothing in the first place, and which is used primarily for cleaning the floors, though also for any other eclectic household need, but not for the jobs that require a more hygienic finish, such as cleaning dishes or eating surfaces. Such a cloth is likely to be found in a cupboard under the kitchen sink, and to be left there in a dampened state. Plain damp rag, it seems to me, is a far more insulting insult to be levied at the President than damp dish rag, or dish cloth; it is a dirtier and more limpid cloth, used for ill-defined and fouler tasks. The correspondent’s interpretation and flight of whimsy, constructing the rag as more of a genteel article for doing the washing up, at least in English, had perhaps lessened the impact of Nigel Farage’s attack. Either way, damp, dirty, or less so, the correspondent’s interpretation of the rag had led to the meaning of Mr Farage's specific insult being filtered, skewed and altered.
    Lavette; torchon (French)
    Bayeta (Spanish)
    Keukenhannoek; vaatdoek; droogdoek; theedoek (Dutch)
    Geschirrtuch (German)
    Strofinaccio (Italian)
    Pano de prato (Portugeuse)
    Disktrasa (Swedish)
*NB. Dishclout: a derogatory name for servant girls in the eighteenth century.

East End Promise: AGAIN

2010-10-28T10:41:00.007+01:00

My painting 'AGAIN' was recently exhibited in the exhibition 'East End Promise: A Story of Cultural Migrants,' a huge collection of work made in and about the East End from 1985 to 2000. The exhibition was curated by Paul Sakoilsky and Ernesto Leal, and took place in LondonNewcastle Project Space, Redchurch Street, from 9th to 24th October 2010. A limited edition catalogue was produced, which included a new text by me.

More information about East End Promise here

Douglas Park performed one of his texts, in front of 'East End Shit Hole,' by Marco Vaulbert de Chantilly.

Photos by Marco.

Digging Performance

2010-09-24T10:44:00.030+01:00

On Saturday 11th September 2010 I performed a ritual of reading, digging and burying. The performance took place in Queen’s Wood, London, as part of ‘Cut Back,’ an exhibition of site specific and performance art.

At 5pm I began the ritual, starting in the main clearing of the wood. I walked out of the clearing followed by a small group of people. I walked slowly but purposefully to discover the first site where I would dig. I took with me a pamphlet which I had made - A pamphlet of extracts from ‘Body’ A Book about the Traces and Manifestations of Time, Memory and Loss. It contained a selection of texts from my book, Body, which I had chosen specially for the digging performance.

Queen’s Wood is covered by a thick spread of tall, mature trees, as well as shorter scrubbier bushes and foliage. The ground is therefore mostly plant-less soil, topped with tree debris or sprinkles of grass. It has denser more impenetrable areas of shrubbery and trees, as well as more stately or preened areas. It is criss-crossed with managed tarmacced paths, as well as foot worn paths made by human traversal.

I chose a spot of ground beneath a canopy of large trees. The ground at this first spot had a light surface covering of shards of bark – I tested it with my toe to see how hard the surface was. I read aloud from the first page of my pamphlet – the passages were Re-Use, The Other Jonah and the Real Marion, Eveline Wesson, and A Solid Piece of Geography. I read volubly, looking at the page, and only occasionally glancing to catch a glimpse of whether anyone was listening or standing nearby. I had the sense of being watched. A small group of people stood close to me, quietly listening and watching. At the end of the passage of text I bent down to the ground, crouching, then kneeling, and began to dig with my bare hands. I scraped into the soil, which was cool and moist. After a few scrapings the black soil was pushed deep under the plates of my nails. I continued digging until I had created a shallow hole. Then, I tore off the first page of the pamphlet, from which I had just read; I folded it twice and placed it in the hole. I then covered over the hole and formed a small mound on the site with the loose earth. Excavated earth never exactly fits back into the hole from which it came; it always has a slightly larger volume. Thus I was able to create a marking mound on the site of the buried page of text, to which I added a few leaves and a small stick, stuck upright on the top, to mark the spot. On leaving the place, the mound became almost invisible amongst the wood’s floor.

Reading and digging at the first site...

From the first site I progressed further along a path, then veered off into a copse covered by a lighter canopy of trees, an area less walked through, and requiring deliberate action to access. Again, I stopped. I had found a place next to a large stone slab laid flat in the ground. It was like an oversized and industrial gravestone, but blank faced. I read passages from the next page – Boab’s Nutrients, Geologies, I Am, Chips And Ham, Punishment, Dust Tea, A Sign, The Dust Destructor, O, Portents and Coming. I stooped, crouched and dug. The soil pushed hard under my nails. Every site had a slightly different texture, and at this one I encountered tendrils of tree roots, which ripped pleasingly as I scraped downwards. The group of people watched silently as I found my way through the soil, noticing as I picked out small obstacles, such as a shard of broken pottery, and a still wriggling worm. My knees were now muddy, though imperceptibly so as I was wearing brown corduroy trousers. The remaining pages of the pamphlet were smeared with soil.

...and at the second site...

I continued through this off-the path part of the wood, leading the group through a scrubby bit which had the sense of being behind the paths which circled the clumps of woodland. The wood is hilly in all directions, with continual ups and downs. We now went up the hillside and I struggled to find a suitable next location. I wondered who might be following me, and what the threshold of their interest or boredom might be. I caught glimpses of their figures and faces. They followed at a slight distance, catching glimpses of me amongst and between and behind bushes and groups of trees. Ahead were traces of other artists’ site specific work – sheets of paper hung from trees with names, glowing white in the near-evening wood-gloom; a washing line of grey ‘smalls’, and the strain of George Formby. These slightly absurd additions to the context drew me to cross a path and over into a densely darkly wooded area with a musty smell, where the music could be just heard. The next text, about my Grandmother, felt it could sit easily with these oddities. I crouched facing downhill where the group were standing. They had listened attentively as I spoke of my Grandmother and her ‘Penelopes.’ I scraped away with increasing frenzy at the somewhat hard ground, trying to reach a deeper layer. I was a small and furtive figure, intent and labouring. Passersby who did not know of the performance, but were simply encountering us upon their walk, paused on hearing fragments of declamatory text, carried on the wind; or at the sight of a small group of stock-still watchers in a section of wood away from the path, their eyes then drawn to a crouching scrabbling figure.

As the number of digging sites increased the pages of the pamphlet diminished, until its pages were held together only by by a loosened thread of white cotton - the spine’s stitching - now coming free like a crochet edging, leaving the book like fragile dry leaves, or fancy lace doilies. But smeared with dirt.

I continued, repeating this process of walking and searching, moving through the woods, looking for suitable digging and burial sites, with the small trail of people following me at a slight distance. We were glimpsed by others, and glimpsed each other through branches, foliage and tree trunks; part obscured by these objects and by the shifting patches of sparkling evening light, and encroaching darkness. Though the evening grew darker, it remained warm; and the digging made me warmer. After the first couple of diggings I had removed my jacket, down to a sleeveless top, and as I dug in the crepuscular light my flesh could be seen to glow white, contrasting with the darkness of the tree branches and earth; a busy spectral creature.

Finally, after seven sites of reading, digging and burying, taking an hour, the entire pamphlet was committed to the soil, covered over and the performance ended.

My readings spoke of incidents with my Grandmother and her dementia, thoughts of my mother summoned by dust in an old library book, histories of dirt, waste and power generation, idiosyncrasies of funerary practices and architectural embodiments of time. Each page of fragments was staged in its own dell or copse or canopied segment of wood, with particular acoustics, fragrances and phenomena of light. The woods had a mushroomy smell, clearly perceptible on passing fungussy growths. The trees provided privacy and cover; the meandering walk into the woods and away from the fixed paths converged privacy with intimacy and potential uneasiness and resonances of danger – further from safety and known pathways, uncertain routes, obscured visibility. The audience placed trust in the ritual, tramping into unknown and muddy, obscure sections of the wood. The text mingled with these places and processes, resonating and finding anchor points. An unfixed, de-limited environment within which to speak and listen, for words to be heard, or missed. Thoughts of ‘the trace,’ ‘the fragment,’ memory, uncertainty, repetition, revision, the obscure (of vision and recall), loss and remains were manifested in the treatment of the text – torn, buried, dirtied, read – and the procession through the woods. Subjecting words to a physical process – of burial, of looking, walking, staging – imparted something of the physicality and experiential history from which they were inspired. The intimacy and absurdity of the repeated digging, the physical effort at something so small, feral, and odd, its furtive quality witnessed through tree branches in half-light, conjured ideas of the darkness and desperation of memory, its struggles and uncertainties, its losses or lacunae. And, more simply, was a set of actions: private, imperative, obscure, using the body as a tool, in direct connection with dirt, in the subversive act of engaging with soil, rooting, rummaging, picking over, secreting. Even in this natural and rarified dirt, environment of animal foraging, traces of the human were ever present – shards of broken glass mixed with soil reminded me that people were here – remembering the performance my mind turns to thoughts of the Victorian dust heap and its coterie of workers, sorting, searching, categorising its contents; and their modern day descendants, rustling, scraping, seeking in the night through the bins and skips of the East End.

Reading, Digging and Burying - Queen's Wood Exhibition

2010-08-23T11:22:00.011+01:00

On Saturday 11th September I will be performing a ritual of reading, digging and burying in Queen's Wood, London. I will be reading from my writing on time, memory and loss - and using my bare hands to dig with.

Please join me at 5pm in the main clearing of Queen's Wood, from where the performance will begin.

A special pamphlet of texts, taken from my book 'Body' and used in my performance, will be available from an Honesty Box in the woods after the performance and also on Sunday 12th September.

(Click on image to view text at readable size)

My Reading, Digging and Burying performance is part of Cut Back, an exhibition of site specific and performance art, taking place in Queen's Wood on the weekend of 11th and 12th September, organized by Rekindle Arts. It features work by many different artists, which will be installed throughout the woods, come rain or shine!

Cut Back is open from noon til dusk on Saturday 11th September, and from 10am to dusk on Sunday 12th September. The private view is on Saturday from 4pm to Dusk.

Queen's Wood
London
N10

Nearest tube: Highgate on the Northern Line.
Then a ten minute walk down Wood Lane, which becomes Queen's Wood Road and takes you alongside the wood. The exhibition is in the portion of the wood on your left hand side. Take any path into the wood and make your way to the main clearing for more information about the exhibition, and the start of my performance.

If you would like to order a copy of the Reading, Digging and Burying Pamphlet: Extracts from 'Body' please email me at gailburton2@hotmail.com

You can see the work I made for the 2008 Queen's Wood exhibition, 'Take a Walk in the Park' here. There are many pictures, in reverse chronology, of the Exercise Rizlas and the Pie Napkins in their pristine pre-wood condition, in their increasingly weathered and soggy state, and after having been dried out. Keep clicking through the pages to older posts - there's also a couple of short films of the napkins wafting in the breeze, caught on a bush...

'Dust' at Eastside Bookshop

2010-08-23T10:00:00.000+01:00

'Dust' pamphlet (2nd edition 2010) is now being stocked by Eastside Bookshop on Brick Lane, London. Eastside specialise in local history, fiction and non fiction, amongst other things, and have an interesting range of London focussed books.

Eastside Bookshop
166 Brick Lane
London
E1 6RU
Phone: 020 7247 0216

'Dust' can still also be found at Housmans Bookshop and bookartbookshop: more information about 'Dust' and where to find it here.

Hands and Knees after Crawl

2010-07-11T19:44:00.008+01:00

I performed 'Crawl' on Saturday 29th May 2010. I crawled on my hands and knees around the lake of Alexandra Palace Park, which took one hour. It had been raining and the ground was cool and wet. At the end my palms were pink and chafed; my knees were also pink and studded with indentations where small stones had pressed through my worn-thin corduroy trousers into my flesh, some remaining embedded for a time. The dirt and detritus collected on my palms was washed away by the wetness of the clean smooth surface near the end of my crawl. My hands and knees returned to normal later that evening; a patch of eczema which appeared several weeks later on my knees has now disappeared. The clothes which I wore and muddied I have now cleaned.

You can read more about 'Crawl' here.

Photos by Tim F.

Crawl

2010-06-28T15:16:00.001+01:00

On Saturday 29th May 2010 I performed 'Crawl' as part of 'Look Harder,' an exhibition of site specific and performance art at Alexandra Palace Park. ‘Look Harder’ was organised and curated by Tony Peakall and Judith Brocklehurst of Rekindle Arts, and included art work by Judith Brocklehurst, Tim Flitcroft, Calum F. Kerr, Miyuki Kasahara, Marco, Tony Peakall and Sarah Sparkes, amongst others. Art works and performance were situated in the vicinity of the lake in Alexandra Palace Park. (Click on Look Harder exhibition for more details of the exhibition). This was the second year that the exhibition had taken place; I also participated in the first exhibition, when I created a banner and performed three solo marches carrying it. (Click on over, banner, march, Alexandra Palace, protestation or tags in the sidebar for posts about the banner march and the first exhibition.)

Crawl was proposed as a counterpoint to a march; its antithesis. It was intended to embody a private world of defeat. I envisaged a temporary escape to a different world; different to our usual sensory experiences, to our ordinary measures of temporality, to notions of patience and endurance:

'I will crawl on my hands and knees, my face and fingers in the dust and dirt. Crawling, I will exit the biped world, relinquishing verticality and the customary plane of society. I will move slowly, perhaps painfully, aware of my body’s awkwardness. Conscious of the detail, detritus and texture of my passage, the aromas and acoustics of movement close to the ground, I will crawl a complete circuit of the lake of Alexandra Palace Park. The antithesis of a march, the crawl will embody the private, the broken, the beaten, the small and the slow.'

The invitation to watch my crawl was also extended to visitors to the park who might wish to perform their own crawl; letters suggesting and inviting a crawl, addressed to ‘Dear Visitor,’ were left in the Lakeside Café. (View or download a Crawl letter here

Ruminating on my task to come, I made a short 'manifesto' style note to myself:

Crawl
Not a march
Antithesis/counterpoint to March
I cannot protest
I have nothing to protest about
I have no power, no agency
I have lost
I am beaten
But I must go on

The prospect of a long crawl – my intended route around the lake had taken me approximately ten or fifteen minutes at marching pace – required some preparation; I did not want to fail at my task, and it felt like a journey into unknown territory, however simple a proposition it might also seem. So after crawling around at home for several nights, learning about the new mode of mobility (or, rather, the very old mode) I decided to undertake a practice crawl in the outdoors. On Friday 28th May 2010 I went to Victoria Park, where I crawled for twelve minutes, from 2.12pm to 2.24pm, starting at the path on the left hand side of the Dogs of Alcibiades statue. I chose the path, which winds through the trees and grass and is surfaced with tarmac, to simulate the conditions in Alexandra Palace Park. On this occasion I was alone, without an audience or an exhibition context, simply a person, crawling. I noted the moment of transition from standing and walking into crawling, the decision to 'enter' the crawl, and felt it as a rupture. The first thing I noticed when I got down on my hands and knees was the temperature of the ground; it was warm to the touch, (though it would become cold later in the crawl.) There were ants and other 'busy-ness' happening on the ground. I was aware that I could not see people immediately around me or approaching close to me, my vision was obscured and altered at this low perspective. As I crawled I repeated to myself that it expresses the defeated, abject, beaten, irrelevant, ignored self. I was therefore particularly surprised that my actions actually garnered immediate and multiple notice, concern and intervention.

A man with a gold tooth approached from behind, where I had not noticed him until he was close, and called out:
'Excuse me, are you alright? Can I help?'
'It's ok,' I replied, 'I'm practicing for a performance.'
'Oh, I thought you might have lost something, thought you were looking for something.'
To him I had appeared to be searching; and a cause for concern.

A young man, amongst a group of other youths, shouted from a distance:
'Are you alright love?'
'Yes, thanks.'

A man in his forties, with a tiny dog, was suddenly visible. He veered from his path and walked over to me.
' 'Scuse me, are you alright mate? Is anything wrong?'
'No, I'm, practicing for a performance.'
'Ohhh...' (he laughed nervously.) 'I thought something was wrong...I thought I might have to call for an ambulance.'
'Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to worry you, sorry.'
'No, no, as long as you're alright mate. Well, I hope you get...what...you're getting for it! You deserve it!'
'Thanks!'

These people had obviously been watching for a while, unbeknownst to me.

Before the Crawl performance at Alexandra Palace I described my practice session to a friend. I mentioned my surprise at the concern that had been expressed about my behaviour, given the widely held idea that a person can lie dead in the street in London and people will simply step around them. My friend connected peoples' response to the particular history of Victoria Park, where in recent years a young woman out jogging had been murdered - perhaps that event has left people sensitive to perceived vulnerability, and willing to intervene. I thought too that my appearance, as a 'normally dressed' and not obviously mad, inebriated or unusual person, perhaps made my behaviour less classifiable or dismissable, and therefore I was both more approachable and more concerning.

The following is an account of my performance Crawl.

Beginning the Crawl; Alexandra Palace in the background

At 7pm I left the Lakeside Café, after a preparatory and fortifying cup of tea, and walked out towards the lake and the path which circles it. I turned to my right, dropped to the floor, and began to crawl on my hands and knees. I did not wear gloves or knee pads, and was clad in my everyday clothing, including my bag, the only concession to my new mode of movement being the old pair of trousers I wore, to preserve the knees of my better trousers which might be worse for wear if they underwent the journey. Unfortunately the fly zip of the old trousers was broken and coming loose, and the waist band a little tight, which made me self-conscious and awkward already. There had been rain on and off all day, and immediately before my performance, though it had ceased by the time I began. The ground was wet and cool to the touch. I noticed immediately that my hands became wet from the surface of the path, and the moisture then picked up small pieces of grit, twig, leaf and blossom, which pressed into my palms as I crawled and stuck there. I paused periodically to brush off the debris from my hands.

Voice and sound came from above, at a distance, disembodied. I was at the level of a small child, or a goose. At the early stages of my crawl I was accompanied by a flotilla of small children; I realised later from photographs that they were variously on foot, skateboard and scooter. At the time their voices and presence was vague. One small girl persistently questioned me in the first stretch of the path, crouching to interrogate: 'What are you? What animal are you?' I replied 'I'm a human being.' Dissatisfied with this answer she continued 'But what are you?' Then decided 'You're a tortoise, a slow tortoise.' I disengaged from the conversation and focussed on my crawl.

Girl questioning crawler

Crawling past boats

Girl crouches at crawler

Skateboarder and crawler

On the ground I saw mainly soggy blossoms, and molten green goose shit, in rivulets and clumps. I avoided this, placing my hands carefully, at first, though later I was too tired to do so. There were tiny twigs and specks of gravel, and other more unusual items of nature's detritus - blossoms like dragon's heads and miniature spheres, like little hard, green beads. I wanted to, and did, stop to move aside some of these items, handle them, or pause with them.

Hand hovering over the ground

Looking at twigs; brushing them aside

Picking bits of detritus from my palms

I had asked a friend to photograph the crawl. As I proceeded I was aware, at times, of his presence, by sound and peripheral vision. I had not wanted a photographer's presence to be obtrusive to viewers, to detract from the solitary act. But the quiet rustle and click of his presence was reassuring to me; I was glad of the companionship, of a kind, as in crawl position I was vulnerable and aware of my vulnerability. I could not see people behind me, nor easily turn round. And though I knew I was in the benign environs of a park, enveloped in an art private view, the longer I crawled, and the further from my start, the more I really entered into another realm of being. The loss of my usual auditory and visual clues for others' presence, the disruption to my customary visual plane and spatial relationship to the world, and its replacement with a new one (the assumption of slowness, discomfort, dirt, fragmentary vision, uncertainty, nearness of ground, downward vision, exclusion…), rendered me progressively more distant and alienated from my sense of my public everyday self, created a kind of disorientation and re-orientation. This re-placement of myself was not purely physical or spatial. Crawling took me further back, further away, absented me from normality; it connected me with something usually hidden as a biped, took me somewhere else in myself.

Being watched by group of people beside a tree

Crawling alone and with pigeon

My knees felt cold, wet, then numb. My trouser legs became damper, eventually flapping wetly against my ankles. The pressure was in the wrists, and not primarily upon the knees as I had expected. My shoulders, neck and arms ached. I tried various techniques to relieve the uncustomary points of pressure - modifying the short, careful crawl-steps into elongated ones by stretching my arms out further at each 'step' and allowing my knees to go further ahead with each movement, covering more ground; I tried just taking it slowly; at times I stretched my legs back to ease the stiffness; and towards the end I flexed my toes with each step to ease the cramps. But generally I just crawled slowly and carefully, taking as long as it took.

Pausing, kneeling, looking

Tipping whilst crawling

Crawling on fingertips

Crawler being photographed

Crawling amongst people

I noticed my breathing, which became slow and rhythmical, like yoga breathing. My breath felt like an assistance to the pain, and a source of energy. But also became simply part of a more basic kind of existence; just moving and breathing.

Part way round I started to crawl blind, crawling with my eyes closed. As I crawled I thought about why I was doing this, repeating almost mantra like 'the antithesis of a march, defined against it, embodying the small, private, broken, beaten...' I repeated these thoughts to myself, my stated intentions in the performance. And I inhabited the impulses that had led to its conception: my sense of the abject, the beaten, the broken, the defeated - in myself, in the world. I continued to crawl with eyes closed and a blankness of thought, with a sense of having given in to the crawl. I felt overwhelmed and found myself sobbing, crying, tears on my face escaping from closed eyes. I continued. I reflected that I was carrying on, I was continuing, no matter how hard or slow or painful, and I could continue, at my own pace too. I could no longer hear the clicking of the camera, but I thought my friend must still be there. When I opened my eyes I was alone. I thought my tears were unwitnessed, and wondered did this matter? I felt an uncertainty and ambiguity of where spectacle, performance, witness and my own experience overlapped and interrelated, uncertainty of what was necessary or present, and how. When I discussed the performance afterwards someone said it reminded him of yoga, of meditation, through which one can reach something higher. I thought maybe I reached something lower - something that in me is often close to the surface, but just held back; now it was present and embodied, but transfigured. In that moment of sobbing I realised the broken and beaten in me was also the strength and propulsion and freedom.

Crawling through the area with bushes I felt most alone and defeated, and also relinquished to the crawl

I crawled with my head down and eyes closed for some of the time

I was unaware, or only partially aware, of the people around me.

I did not see these boys, who veered away to avoid me

I crawled through the wooded area

When I had been crawling for some time I heard the voice of a woman walking beside me who said 'Does it hurt? More than it looks?' I replied 'Mmmm, yes' as best I could. 'You're nearly there, you're doing really well, ' she said. I continued, now thoroughly having had enough of it, and longing for the end point, at the completion of the circuit of the lake, back at the beginning. Suddenly I was eye level with a goose, and afraid of it. I detoured to avoid it, and others, but at this stage I was tired and slow and wimpering slightly at the soreness of my knees.

After one hour I arrived at the end, and rose to my feet.

Someone said to me afterwards that 'it makes you stronger, it takes strength.' I reflected that the pain of it felt like a release, escape, expression - expresion in the sense of letting out. A proof of endurance, of what one can take. Not to exaggerate: it was uncomfortable and painful certainly, but bearable, and with no lasting damage - a large red indentation in each knee, and red chafed palms were the only visible imprint - but something of the slowness and strangeness of the journey - the extreme slowness - perhaps took me on a journey beyond the parameters of the lake and the actual discomfort.

As I performed the crawl it felt such an internal, isolated and private experience that I thought its visual aspect might not convey how it felt being in it. The responses of some of the spectators, however, conveyed that the performance had, for them, tallied with my own experience. In the preparation crawl in Victoria Park, the men’s recognition and expressed concern of my being outside the norm, the wrongness and vulnerability of my actions pointed to the severing I felt with the normal world. And after the actual performance in Alexandra Palace one person described it as 'a spectacle of suffering', catching the state I had entered into in executing the crawl, but also the difficulty of watching such a performance. I assumed that being expected to watch/enjoy the ‘spectacle’ passively, and not to intervene, was perhaps compromising. Other people told me that in Mexico and France people undertake something similar, as a kind of prayer, or to obtain something they need. I felt no such sense of a system of redemption or beneficent power that my crawl could activate, but it seems there are many ways to crawl and meanings thereof.

*Note. About three weeks after the crawl I found I had itchy knees and acquired a small red patch of eczema on each knee cap. Perhaps a manifest memory or memento of the Crawl.

All Photos are by Marco.

Review of Look Harder in the Hornsey Journal

Review in Ham and High

Dust For Sale

2010-06-25T12:06:00.011+01:00

'Dust' is an artists' book in the form of a pamphlet; it contains a sequence of my texts and drawings which refer to the 'bin scavengers', the Victorian dust heap and ideas of memorialisation and filth.

'Dust' (2nd edition, 2010) is currently being stocked by Eastside Bookshop, who specialise in local history, fiction and non fiction, amongst other things, and have an interesting range of London focussed books.

Eastside Bookshop
166 Brick Lane
London
E1 6RU
Phone: 020 7247 0216

'Dust' (2nd edition, 2010) is also stocked by Housmans Bookshop.

Housmans is an amazing shop, with a cavern of wonderful printed material. In their words:

'Housmans is London's premier radical bookshop. We specialise in books, zines, and periodicals of radical interest and progressive politics. We stock the largest range of radical newsletters, newspapers and magazines of any shop in Britain.'

Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road, Kings Cross, London N1 9DX
mobile: 07950 269 286
Tel: 020 7837 4473
shop@housmans.com

The handmade first edition of 'Dust' is available from bookartbookshop, which stocks a vast array of artists' books and multiples.

'bookartbookshop features the publications of some of Britain’s best-known artist presses and publishers of artists’ books, as well as books from abroad. The shop is a centre and a service for individual & institutional collectors, artists, publishers and the aesthetically and bibliographically curious.'

bookartbookshop
17 Pitfield St, LONDON N1 6HB
020 7608 1333
info@bookartbookshop.com

Please view earlier posts for more information on 'Dust' - the pamphlet and exhibition at Hovel:

About Dust

Dust First Edition

Dust exhibition at Hovel

Here is an extract from Dust:

The man in the bin chamber has to climb inside the bin today in order to reach the rubbish, as it’s not very full. He hoists himself up and over the side to stand inside. Since the instigation of recycling schemes the quality of the general household rubbish has gone down. Most useful rubbish – such as containers, glass bottles, and aluminium cans – has been separated and collected separately by the council. That which is deposited in the bins now is mostly Tesco bags filled with rotting food and nappies. But it’s worth looking through. Not everyone recycles. It’s dark in the bin chamber, so the man takes a promising looking bag and pulls it outside and onto the tarmac of the courtyard to look more carefully. He crouches on the floor and splits open the blue plastic bag. Inside are the empty containers of a takeaway, still greasy and spicy smelling, and six empty Stella cans. And something with wires, a hair curler?

…The scattered items are not strewn or thrown; they are simply removed from the bin, awaiting the man’s attention. Whilst I watch, his attention is entirely focussed on one item. I cannot tell exactly what it is. It is rectangular and metallic, apparently aluminium. It could be innards of an electrical ‘white good’, such as a fridge or cooker. But it seems smaller than that to me – perhaps a heater or radiator? Whatever it is it must be sturdy as it is withstanding multiple attempts to dismantle it. The man attempts to pull a side from it. He turns the metal box around and pulls at another side. He lays it on its back and puts his foot on top to give leverage and pulls again. The object remains in tact. He repeats this process, turning, pulling, levering maybe five more times. I watch for five minutes. He does not become frustrated, or does not express it. He patiently repeats his attempts. He pays no attention to the courtyard around him – does not look up at the windows, or across to the doorways or benches. Although it is night it’s not late, and people are still in their kitchens, which face the courtyard, but he is unconcerned with potential observers. One or two people return home to the doorway behind him, but do not even turn to look at him. I wonder if he is invisible. A young man walks past him, and glances over; I guess he is not invisible. But these passers by do not distract him from his enterprise.

Crawl Performance / Look Harder Exhibition

2010-05-12T12:57:00.009+01:00

I will be performing ‘Crawl’ on Saturday 29th May 2010 as part of ‘Look Harder,’ an exhibition of site specific and performance art at Alexandra Palace Park, curated by Rekindle Public Arts. The exhibition ‘Look Harder’ runs from Saturday 29th May to Sunday 6th June, open daily from 10am to 5.30pm, with many other artists participating. The private view is on Saturday 29th May from 5pm to 8pm.

I will crawl on my hands and knees, my face and fingers in the dust and dirt. Crawling, I will exit the biped world, relinquishing verticality and the customary plane of society. I will move slowly, perhaps painfully, aware of my body’s awkwardness. Conscious of the detail, detritus and texture of my passage, the aromas and acoustics of movement close to the ground, I will crawl a complete circuit of the lake of Alexandra Palace Park.

My crawl will be the antithesis of a march. One year ago I marched around the same lake’s circumference – bold, public, declamatory, protesting. My crawl will embody the private, the broken, the beaten, the small and the slow.

During the exhibition visitors are invited to perform their own crawl. A letter of invitation will be available in the Park Café, or download a copy here.

You can view posts here about my Banner March, which was performed in 2009 as part of 'Good News', in Alexandra Palace Park.

‘Look Harder’ will be open from Saturday 29th May to Sunday 6th June, in and around Lakeside Cafe and the lake in Alexandra Palace Park.
The private view is on Saturday 29th May from 5pm to 8pm.
‘Crawl’ will take place on Saturday 29th May 2010 at 7pm, around the lake at Alexandra Palace Park.

Transport to Alexandra Palace Park:
Overground Train to Alexandra Palace (e.g. from Kings Cross or Old Street station), or the tube to Wood Green.
Then take the W3 bus towards Finsbury Park and get off at Alexandra Palace Ice Rink.
The lake and Lakeside Cafe is 5 minute’s walk from there.

Miniscule Exhibition

2010-05-11T12:11:00.002+01:00

I will be showing one of my Matchbox Rizla Drawings in the group exhibition 'Miniscule' at Oblong Gallery. The exhibition is open from 3rd to 27th June, with a private view on Wednesday 2nd June, at 69a Southgate Road, London N1 3JS. The opening hours are Wed - Fri 10am-6pm and Sat - Sun 11am-6pm. Full details are on the Oblong Gallery website.

British Library Archives Rizla blog

2010-05-09T14:48:00.000+01:00

Matchbox Rizla Drawings blog has been selected to be preserved by the British Library's UK Web Archive project. This means that regular 'snapshots' of my blog at particular points in time will be available to view on the archive for ever! So even when my blog changes and evolves, as is the nature of a blog, previous incarnations will still be view-able. The first 'snapshot' is now available at Matchbox Rizla Drawings Web Archive. Click on the thumbnail icon (although the thumbnail image has yet to be generated! - it is a work in progress) to visit the archived version. The UK Web Archive represents a diverse range of websites, from arts, information, museums, to reports and research, and will be expanded over time.

New Dust at the Walsall Artists' Book Fair

2010-05-08T18:03:00.010+01:00

I will be taking part in the Artists' Books and Independent Publishing Fair, at The New Art Gallery Walsall on Saturday 22nd and Sunday 23rd May 2010. The Fair will be the first opportunity to purchase my newly published 2nd edition of 'Dust Pamphlet.'

If you're not in the Walsall area, you can still purchase one of the first edition hand-stitched Dusts from bookartbookshop, at 17 Pitfield Street, London.

'Dust Pamphlet' contains a sequence of short texts about the ‘bin scavengers’ and other stories of filth from my observations. The text is interspersed with illustrations, from my original ink and watercolour drawings, including ‘the heap’ and imagery inspired by mourning jewellery. The pamphlet interlaces ideas of the Victorian dust heap, dirt and searching to reflect on memorialisation and loss.

I created 'Dust Pamphlet' as part of a residency and exhibition, also entitled Dust, at Hovel in November 2009 (see previous posts, below). After an encouraging response to my hand-stitched first edition I decided to produce a second edition in 2010. The new Dust will be published by Site Projects on 21st May, ISBN 978-0-9554379-6-0. Please email gailburton2@hotmail.com for further details.

Malcolm McLaren Only Died Once

2010-05-08T13:00:00.012+01:00

I heard on the radio in the morning on the 22nd of April that it was Malcolm McLaren's funeral later that afternoon, and that the public were invited to attend his funeral procession. I looked on the internet to confirm the route - the funeral cortege would pass through Camden at 1.15 and then continue up Chalk Farm road and wend its way to Highgate Cemetery. The given route didn't exactly make sense in its detail when I followed it on my A to Z, and I thought maybe that uncertainty was a deliberate anarchic action. Perhaps the funeral procession would not take this route at all? However, in the miserable mood I had been in recently I decided that a day out to Malcolm McLaren's funeral would be just what I needed. The weather was sunny, and after some procrastination about whether my bike would be a hindrance once I arrived in Camden, I decided to go, via cycle.

My interest in the event came partly from my enduring love of punk, the history of which McLaren is indelibly written into. But his financial exploitation of The Sex Pistols gave me reservations. Perhaps because of rather than despite this ambiguity I was drawn to the event - to witness McLaren's ambiguous role as arch-manipulator/exploiter/creator in his final action. I was intrigued to see how his Situationist and punk ideas would manifest, how his media manipulations and constructions would operate even in death. On the morning of the funeral I began to think about his Situationist inspirations, and the proposition of a funereal derive inserted into my bleak-looking day became appealing. This impetus overlapped with my fascination for Victorian commemorative tissues, many of which document funeral processions, or other ritual public processions. Through reading the text on those mementos I have learned the intricate and long forgotten details of itineries and routes of distant public events. These commemorations inscribed memory and mourning on the streets of London, in ephemeral passages through the streets, remembered today only on fragmentary tissue prints. Malcolm McLaren's funeral procession seemed to me an incarnartion of this Victoriana, and of a piece with his Dickensian posturing. A final intervention in the lives of the public/audience/media and representation of himself.

I cycled to Camden, and arrived at one pm. As it neared two pm, and the streets were thick with mourners, I wondered whether it was a final hoax or scam - the funeral was somewhere else; he wasn't actually dead. Yet I also felt sadness, knowing that he was dead, and a horrible and relatively early death. I was glad that there was a decent turn out to mark his passing. At about two-twenty cheers began and the first vehicle of the funeral procession came into sight. Several long black cars, followed by one whose windows were filled with a floral tribute, a blue flower background with white flower text proclaiming CASH FROM CHAOS. Next a traditional horse drawn hearse, with two black plumed beasts, and clearly visible in the carriage McLaren's coffin, its side spray-painted with 'Too fast to live too young to die'. Finally, I could see the source of the noise I had been hearing, which till now had been muffled by the crowd. A dark green Routemaster bus hung with a giant poster in lurid pink and yellow with 'MM' initials brought up the tail of the procession. Blaring from the bus was music associated with McLaren, mainly the Sex Pistols. The bus passengers/mourners were hanging out of the windows, posturing punkishly and joyfully. T-shirts emblazoned with 'Cash From Chaos' were hung in the bus windows, price £45, and the bus passengers were flinging flyers from the roof - a final gesture of merchandising and exploitation.

The long-time static and mournful crowd were suddenly animated and elated by the bus's arrival, and there was a tremendous scrum of press photographers and mourners all of whom were simultaneously leaping after it. I watched for a while. Then I thought, 'I came to follow the procession'; so I mounted my bike and pushed into the crowd, keeping sight of the back of the bus. I felt vindicated in my right to jostle - I had come to attend the funeral procession, it wasn't my fault if I knocked into people who were only there to report it; it was necessary to follow the bus. I had thought the bike would be a hindrance but now I saw it was an asset, amongst the thick of the crowd, giving me a vantage point and defence. The bus began to speed up and three or four rent-a punks (like those on London postcards) raced after it 'Take me with you!' one begged. They jumped on the back bumper and clung on as the bus gained speed, leaving Camden High Street behind. Were they paid actors, or just out of time?

I was right behind the bus now and thought I'd just keep going. The photographers had thinned out; just a few stragglers running along remained, and as the bus accelerated those last few fell away. One of the punks vomitted profusely as we turned a corner; was it fake vomit? It projectiled so smoothly. A fleck caught my shoulder. The music from the bus created a mobile party and I joined in the ridiculous spectacle - three fake punks, three bearded men on Harley Davidsons, one old-punk on a bicycle, one puffing photographer on a bike, and me. Apart from the photographer cyclist we all semi-danced, cheered and sang as we pedalled furiously after the bus. The bus passengers looked on, dancing and singing and punk-gesticulating. The repertoire had progressed from 'C'mon Everybody' and 'Anarchy in the UK' on Camden High Street to 'Pretty Vacant' on Kentish Town Road, and 'Something Else' by the time of what was possibly Highgate Road, though my eyes being transfixed on the bus I had no real idea where I was. The distance seemed much further than I had thought it would be to Highgate Cemetery, perhaps because of a route I didn't know, or because of my focus on the bus. My lungs were filled with the fumes of the motorbikes and bus combined, and I was aware of my proximity to these much larger and heavier vehicles, which might potentially crush me, as we alternately stopped, weaved and sped.

I had not expected when I set out that morning to follow the procession all the way to the cemetery; I had envisaged watching it pass, and perhaps walking alongside a little way, wheeling my bike - I was not prepared for this whirlwind madcap journey through North London. Yet I could not understand why there remained just this handful of mourners following the procession - surely committed fans would have made more effort or preparation to follow the procession? Why had they not all come on bicycle? It seemed to me an opportunity not to be missed - Malcolm McLaren was only going to die once. I felt I had to see it through to the end, a commitment to the route and the journey, however ludicrous and lured I felt or appeared. We arrived at the top of the hill and the leafy edge of Highgate cemetery. The bus stopped. I parked my bike on the ground and sat on a bench. The bus passengers must have disembarked and entered the cemetery for the funeral, but I didn't notice. I sat on the bench and reflected on the surprise and suddenness of my journey. Then I figured out my route back and cycled off down the hill. I passed by the empty horse-drawn hearse, waiting at another entrance/exit to the cemetery. I wondered what it was waiting for, as presumably the coffin had been buried.

Crossbones/GHost II

2009-12-09T11:01:00.014Z

On Friday the 18th December I am showing my film Crossbones as part of GHost II, a night of artist films, performance and moving image interventions in St John's Church, Bethnal Green.

The event takes place from 6pm to 10pm, and screenings commence at 7.30pm.
St John's Church is opposite Bethnal Green tube, at 200 Cambridge Heath Road, E2 9PA.

Crossbones: an unconsecrated graveyard where from medieval times prostitutes and other marginalised people have been buried. Now, some of the bodies have been exhumed and the ground lies derelict. But a shrine to the memory of these long dead people has emerged on the fence around the ground. Ephemeral memorials of ribbon and paper remember the thousands buried here, and mark more recent deaths, including the murdered Ipswich prostitutes.

2009
2 minutes 16 seconds
Colour and sound

GHost II  curated by Sarah Sparkes and Ricarda Vidal

Join us for the Return of GHost!
A night of artist films, performances and moving image interventions to celebrate the darkest days of the season and to welcome in the ghosts that inhabit them. With moving image installations around the foyer and belfry and a screening of artist films on a movie-sized screen in the nave.
Plus, as a finale a screening of Mario Bava's 1963 classic, 'I tre volti della paura: La goccia d'acqua’.
And, of course,Mulled wine and minced pies!

 With: Glenn Church, Jo Wonder, Geraldine Swayne, Daisy Delaney, Sinead Wheeler, Magnus Irving, Sarah Doyle, Tessa Garland, Lisa Fielding Smith, Gail Burton, Rebecca Feiner, Sam Treadaway, Katja Tukiainen, Sarah Breen Lovett, Calum F Kerr, Richard Mansfield, Mikey Georgeson, Fernando Cestari, Reverend Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly, Anne Charlotte Morgenstein, Andrew Graves-Johnston, Geoff and the Daughters of Moroni, Miyuki Kasahara, Jo David, Julian Wakeling, Derek Jordan, and David Buckley on the ORGAN

Visit our website for more info: host-a-ghost or join our Facebook group.

With thanks to St John’s Church on Bethnal Green, the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies (University of London), Betting on Shorts, Paul Dillon, Jonathon McKay, and Intellect Books

Some more of my Crossbones pictures:

DUST at Hovel

2009-11-19T15:42:00.009Z

Here is a sample of pictures from DUST, my exhibition/intervention at Hovel in Camberwell, South London in 2009.

For full details about DUST, including visiting times and the DUST Pamphlet, please see the earlier posts below.

DUST Haircutting Performance

2009-11-18T15:16:00.004Z

For the private view of DUST I gave a Haircutting Performance.

The performance was unnanounced, taking place in the living room of Hovel, amidst the exhibition.

From the DUST Table Collection I removed a reel of white cotton, a pair of hairdressing scissors and a pile of tiny brown envelopes. I then pulled forward the chair, which was against the wall. I sat, in silence, and put the envelopes on the floor to my right, the thread and scissors on my lap. I then separated a lock of hair from my head, took the scissors and cut it off. I bound the end of the lock of hair with thread, and tied it. I leant forward, picked up an envelope from the pile, and placed the lock inside it; licked and sealed the envelope. I then placed it to my left, on the floor. I repeated this process, cutting locks from my hair and placing them in an envelope, forming a pile of filled envelopes. The process was slow and laborious; it was unclear how long it would take to complete the task. From time to time I shuffled through the filled envelopes, counting and neatening the pile. The people present watched in silence and stillness. The sound from two films in the exhibition played, repeating; sounding like waves, water, or sometimes trains. When I had cut enough hair locks to create a substantial pile of envelopes, and consequently had altered the appearance of my hair, I counted through the filled envelopes. I put down the cotton thread, scissors and unused envelopes, rose from the chair, then gave an envelope containing a lock of my hair to each person in the room.

Here are some still frames from a film of the performance.

DUST table collection

2009-11-10T11:59:00.006Z

Heap/Hole film
Scissors
White flower
Two small keys...
Stone with hole
Dust and fluff
Plastic twist
Wire/flex fragment
Tiny envelopes
Cassette tape fragment
Used Rawl plug
Text on cardboard
Broken spectacles
'Road gems'/broken glass
Headache pill packaging
Ink drawings...

...crumpled paper
Broken plaster sculpture - ankles
DUST pamphlet with ribbon
Dust ball from the floor...

DUST - some pictures

2009-11-10T11:26:00.007Z

Some pictures from DUST, in the living room - see earlier posts for details of the exhibition

Ink on paper, oil on canvas, watercolour, printed text.

DUST - Artificial Limbs

2009-11-10T11:08:00.006Z

Some pictures from DUST at Hovel.

Ink on paper

DUST at Hovel

2009-10-31T22:34:00.005Z

DUST
Gail Burton
The sixth intervention by an individual artist at Hovel

Exhibition open from Saturday 7th November until Sunday 22nd November 2009
Private View on Sunday 8th November, 4pm to 8pm
Opening hours:
Saturday and Sunday 12 to 6pm
Weekdays by appointment
Hovel is located in Camberwell, South London. For the address, or to make an appointment to visit, please phone 020 7703 6337 or email hoveltenant@googlemail.com

Dust, the Victorian term for all manner of waste or rubbish: a valuable substance that told the story of the lives that produced it; a heap to be carefully categorised and searched through; a point in a process. For the sixth intervention at Hovel, Gail Burton has created a collection of paintings and mixed media works exploring the connections between looking (looking for, looking at), the unseen and memorialisation. A narrative of dirt, of contemporary London's invisible dust-economy, interweaves with portraits of long dead people, painted from miniature Victorian photographs on mourning jewellery. The names of the Victorians who mourned, and were mourned, are lost, but their images connect us to the act of remembering. As a traditional ballad, 'The Housewife's Lament' sings 'There's nothing that lasts us but trouble and dirt'. Dust and dirt remember us; we live on in unseen ways.

DUST Pamphlet

2009-10-30T11:16:00.005Z

As part of my intervention at Hovel I produced a pamphlet entitled 'DUST'. The pamphlet contains a sequence of short texts I have written regarding the bin scavengers, whom I have observed, and other reflections on filth. The text is interspersed with illustrations, which connect my observations of dirt and searching with loss and memorialisation. The pamphlet is A5 size, printed on 95g acid free paper and is hand stitched. It is printed in an open edition, each copy signed and numbered. If you would like a copy please email me at gailburton2@hotmail.com.

Hovel Residency

2009-10-24T13:17:00.010+01:00

For the next two weeks I am undertaking a residency for Hovel, a project created in a domestic space in Camberwell, South London. My residency will result in an intervention in the space, culminating in an exhibition. I have been preparing for my intervention by creating a series of paintings, which respond to a collection of Victorian mourning jewellery, and developing ideas of the rubbish heap, both of 'olden' and contemporary times. I will post full details of the exhibition, when my residency is underway.

In the meantime, I would like to announce that the exhibition will open on Saturday the 7th of November 2009, until Sunday the 22nd November, and there will be a private view on Sunday the 8th of November, from 4pm until 8pm. Feel free to email me for further information at gailburton2@hotmail.com.

Fig Rolls and never never never

2009-08-02T08:30:00.006+01:00

I drew this tissue drawing for the Honesty Box during the Arnold Circus Sharing Picnic - perhaps with thoughts of the strata revealed in the Arnold Circus dig (in recent weeks the mound of the bandstand has been subject to a small archaeological excavation) - but certainly not as an invective against Fig Rolls! The Fig Rolls were my contribution to the picnic - see previous posts for more information about the Arnold Circus Picnic, and other Brown Food.

Boundary Estate Tissues

2009-07-28T15:53:00.004+01:00

Here are two of the tissue drawings I made for the Honesty Box at Arnold Circus. They refer to the fact that tenants from the Old Nichol slum area, which was cleared to make way for the new Boundary Estate in the 1890s, where Arnold Circus became the centrepiece, were not rehoused in the new improved accomodation, as originally planned. Instead they were dipersed into the surrounding area, often back into overcrowded conditions. Ever since the Boundary Estate was built, as radical new public housing, which was innovative and high quality in design, there have been attempts to remove it from public ownership. This vulnerability echoes from the time when the original dwellers of the areas were displaceced , as they were not wealthy enough for the new estate. Although it was low cost, it was not low enough for the very poor.

Honesty Box at Arnold Circus

2009-07-28T15:02:00.012+01:00

On Sunday 26th July 2009 I did an Honesty Box, with Clare Qualmann, at Arnold Circus on the Boundary Estate in London, for the Friends of Arnold Circus Annual Sharing Picnic. Here are a few photos of the event - there are lots more photos of this and previous Honesty Boxes on the Honesty Box website, as well as a full log of the Honesty Box at Arnold Circus.

We placed the Honesty Box on the second tier of Arnold Circus.

The Pavilion Brass Band played in the Bandstand, making lovely melancholy of a diverse range of tunes. Then there was folk music for the rest of the day, on the bandstand mound, and later inside the bandstand. Some of the musicians were Mariah Harris, Emil Brynge and David Wegne, and an impromptu performance from Sam Lee. Their music was beautiful and moving. It was poignant in the conditions of rain and the damaged , derelict bandstand - their music personalised the space of Arnold Circus, bringing a sense of other stories and histories to layer onto it, and catch or chime with my own; the music's transience felt appropriate given the fragility of the bandstand, and the estate's continuing histories; something that I could only 'hold on to' for myself. Some of the musicians appreciated the drawings, which was nice, as although Honesty Box is always an experiment, and however people respond (or don't respond) to it, is part of that experiement, it can make me feel sad when it is ignored or abused. I hope that something of the thoughts and stories and images that were expressed on the tissues worked their way into the history and story of Arnold Circus in the 'leafing through' that they underwent, as a few people inspected the Honesty Box.

In the late afternoon we moved the Honesty Box into the bandstand as it was raining quite heavily. (It had been spitting on and off all day).
Arnold Circus bandstand is usually painted green, but it has now been painted black, perhaps to conceal fire damage...

...the roof of the bandstand is badly fire damaged after the recent arson attack.

My Brown Food contribution to the 'Sharing Picnic'. Scroll down to have a look at other Brown Food in my previous blog entries.

Sam Lee and Ukelele player/singer, performing in the bandstand, at the end of the day, when it was raining and most people had gone home.

Here's Arnold Circus Bandstand in 2007, when I was campaigning to save the Boundary Estate from being privatised - it is a Council Estate and the council attempted to sell/give it away to a Housing Association, which would have removed it from public ownership forever. The bandstand is in the centre of the Boundary Estate and I and other residents used it as a meeting place during our campaign.

Honesty Box at Arnold Circus

2009-07-16T09:26:00.003+01:00

On Sunday 26th July I am doing an Honesty Box, with Clare Qualmann, at the Arnold Circus Picnic. The event will take place on and around the Arnold Circus Bandstand, on the Boundary Estate, E2, from 2pm to 8pm. Please come along and have a look for the box amongst the foliage of the Circus – it may move around so do give me a ring if you can’t find it!

For more information about the Honesty Box, and pictures and log from our recent Camberwell Honesty Boxes, please visit Honesty Box

Gail's mobile
07814 812 338

OVER: Protestation Banner at Showflat Annuale

2009-07-14T10:55:00.001+01:00

OVER: Protestation Banner installed for Showflat 7 - The Annuale (details of the exhibition can be found below, in previous post).

For details of the Banner March, performed with the banner in May 2009, please scroll down to earlier posts from May/June 2009, e.g. OVER Banner March/26th May

This is a work in the Showflat 7 exhibition by one of the other artists, Marlene Harring.

Showflat 7 - The Annuale

2009-07-14T10:51:00.008+01:00

I am taking part in the first group show of the Showflat artists - 'Showflat 7, The Annuale', which marks a year of Showflat exhibitions. The exhibition runs from Saturday 25th July to Sunday 2nd August 2009, daily from 10am to 6pm, in a house in Mile End, London. The opening Flat Party is on Friday 24th July from 7pm to 12am. Please contact me at gailburton2@hotmail.com for more details, or visit Showflat

‘Showflat 7 - The Annuale’ is the first group show with all of the Showflat artists, who have had individual Showflat exhibitions over the last year. Whereas each of those exhibitions took place in the artist’s own flat, 'The Annuale' will take place in the house of Nathaniel Clark, the Showflat curator (Showflat is conceived and created by Mario Borza, who will also be exhibiting).

For my piece in the exhibition I am installing OVER: Protestation Banner. The banner has endured ten days in the outdoors and three marching performances; I hope that coming to rest for a week during The Annuale it can exist as a relic of its role and uses so far. The banner will be hung in the style of a ‘church banner’ in the high space of the stairwell. You are invited to process up the fifty stairs to the top of the house – up the five flights to the fifth floor – to witness the ‘OVER: Protestation Banner’. Relic of Three Banner Marches, created to reflect on the role of protest - in the light of the death of Ian Tomlinson, the Global Financial Crisis, and more personal resonances – the banner now resides at the top of the stairs. Endure the five-flights’ procession to view the banner and interpret its ambiguous message in the context of Showflat 7: The Annuale.

Honesty Box at Camberwell Arts Festival

2009-06-15T09:11:00.006+01:00

On Friday 26th and Saturday 27th June 2009 I will be showing Honesty Box, with Clare Qualmann, as part of Camberwell Arts Festival. Drawing on the tradition of makeshift roadside stalls selling jam or home-made produce, crockery or oddments, the 'Honesty Boxes' will be located in and around Camberwell, London. Each Honesty Box will consist of a cardboard box filled with drawings on Kleenex tissues and a jar for money. The boxes will be labelled 'Drawings for sale £1 each' and left in public places for people to look into, leaf through, buy, steal, destroy or ignore.

Come to Camberwell and see if you can locate the Honesty Boxes – call Gail on 07814 812 338 or Clare on 07782 271 989 for up to date details of their location. Camberwell Green will be the base for our Honesty Box excursions. The boxes will be sited from 10am til 4pm.

You can see pictures of previous Honesty Boxes on the Honesty Box website where we will be documenting the new Camberwell box. For information about previous festivals visit Camberwell Arts Festival website.

You can see pictures of my contribution to the 2008 Camberwell Arts Festival at Sober Rizlas

Honesty Box
Friday 26th and Saturday 27th June 2009
10am - 4pm

For more information about Clare's work visit Clare Qualmann's website

Miniature Land Art

2009-06-15T09:05:00.002+01:00

Here are some more of the artworks in the 'Good News' show at Ally Pally. All of the pieces are by The Miniature Land Art Foundation.

'Styrofoam Spiral Jetty'

and again, with a duck to indicate the scale.

'Partially Buried Hornby Woodshed'

'Das Roden Crater'

...and a detail of 'Das Roden Crater'

Route of the Banner March

2009-06-15T09:00:00.003+01:00

Banner March 1
Saturday 23rd May 2009, at 5.30pm
Clockwise

Start at Alexandra Palace, in the Ice Skating Rink car park, walk down the hill past the funfair on the right, turn right along the hedge, take the last entrance into the lake, turn left at the lake and continue walking around the lake, with the water on the right hand side. Circuit the lake until the point just after the second-from-last bench before the café. Place the Banner down here, and tie it to the railings, which are on the left-hand-side perimeter of the lakeside area. Walk away.

Banner March 2
Wednesday 27th May 2009, at 11am
Anti-clockwise

Approach the banner from the opposite direction to when it was deposited, by walking anti-clockwise around the lake, with the café on the right hand side, to the point just before the second bench after the café. Untie the Banner from the railings where it is tied on the right hand side perimeter of the lakeside area. Begin walking around the lake, with the water on the left. Complete one full circuit of the lake and deposit the Banner back where it was.

Banner March 3
Sunday 31st May 2009 (Whit Sunday), at 5pm
Anti-clockwise

Approach the banner from the café side of the lake, as in the second march, and untie it from the railings. Circuit the lake, with the water on the left, and exit at the last exit on the right, before the café. Turn right and continue walking towards the Palace, re-tracing in reverse the beginning phase of the first march, turning left up the hill past the funfair and into the Ice Skating Rink car park, and disperse.

Third Banner March

2009-05-28T09:42:00.002+01:00

My third - and final - Banner March will take place at 5pm on Sunday 31st May 2009, starting near the cafe by the lake at Alexandra Palace Park. Please come along to see the March, and to inspect the 'OVER: Protestation Banner' after its ten days outside in the park. Full details of transport and times are in the posts below.

Film: Banner March 1

2009-05-28T09:31:00.003+01:00

You can view my film of Banner March 1 on You Tube. The film was recorded by Gimpo of my performance on Saturday 23rd May 2009 when I marched around the lake at Alexandra Palace Park, carrying my 'OVER: Protestation Banner'. If you would like to see a high quality version of the film please contact me at gailburton2@hotmail.com

OVER Banner March

2009-05-26T11:10:00.010+01:00

At 11am on Wednesday 27th May I will be performing my second Banner March around the lake in Alexandra Palace Park, carrying my ‘OVER: Protestation Banner’. The March will begin from the Cafe side of the lake. You are welcome to come and spectate, and to view the other works in the ‘Good News’ Exhibition, which are situated around the lake. The Banner will remain in the park for the duration of the exhibition, whatever the weather. The exhibition closes on Sunday 31st May, when I will be performing my third March at 5pm. I hope you can join me. Please see the posts below for further information on the exhibition and transport details.

Banner March:
Wednesday 27th May at 11am
Sunday 31st May at 5pm

Here are some photos from the first Banner March, circuiting the lake at Alexandra Palace Park, which took place on Saturday 23rd May at 5.30pm. The first four photos were taken by Barnaby Hewlett and Clare Qualmann.

The route of the March began at the top of the hill, by Alexandra Palace, and processed down past the Funfair towards the lake, entering at the entrance nearest the Cafe, then continuing round to the left to circuit the lake, and ending at the Cafe side of the lake by the railings, where the banner was deposited, attached to the railings.

Good News Exhibition - OVER: Protest Banner

2009-05-12T12:28:00.009+01:00

I am taking part in ‘Good News’, an exhibition of site specific and performance art, which will take place in Alexandra Palace Park, London (in the vicinity of the Lakeside Café). The exhibition opens on Saturday 23rd May and is open daily until Sunday 31st May, 10am til 5.30pm. The private view is on Saturday 23rd May from 5pm til 8pm.

I have created a new piece of work for the exhibition - ‘OVER: Protest Banner’ – with which I will be performing a solo March, circuiting the lake. The banner will also be on display in the park throughout the show (and the weather).

I will be marching on the following dates:

Saturday 23rd May (during the private view) at 5.30pm
Wednesday 27th May at 11am
Sunday 31st May at 5pm

Please note – my banner will not be in the exhibition on the first day of the exhibition until 5.30pm, when I will perform my first March with it.

The banner is inspired by Suffragette textile banners and, in the context of the recent G20 protests and the death of Ian Tomlinson, is intended as a reflection on the role and meaning of protest. The banner is a development of my more ephemeral text pieces, and features an ambiguous statement – ‘OVER’ – which is intended to be open to various interpretations, to allow the possibility of political and also more personal inferences, and so to reflect on our relationship to protest. I envision the solo march with the banner as a contemplative act for myself, and hopefully a spectacle that will animate the banner and its message. The banner will inevitably endure much weather during the time of the exhibition, and will therefore betray something of its use and history by the time of the final march.

Transport to Alexandra Palace Park:
Overground Train to Alexandra Palace (e.g. from Kings Cross or Old Street station).
Or the tube to Wood Green.
Then take the W3 bus towards Finsbury Park and get off at Alexandra Palace Ice Rink.
The lake and Lakeside Cafe is 5 minute’s walk from there.

Handkerchief Show at Cecil Sharp House

2009-04-08T14:15:00.005+01:00

Here are some installation shots of 'Flash Company: A Handkerchief Show at Cecil Sharp House' (see my previous posts for more details). There is a catalogue of the show on the Flash Company blog, where you can see full details of all the work.

Clockwise from top left, handkerchiefs by: Gwen Brunton, Adam Rompel, Matthew Cowan, Gail Burton, Bishi & Giles Pearson, Sam Lee, Mami Fujita, John Lawrence.

OVER: Protestation Handkerchief, by Gail Burton

Flash company....been the ruin of me, by Bishi & Giles Pearson

Handkerchief from the series 'love spray', by Matthew Cowan.

2009-04-08T14:14:00.003+01:00

Killimangina by Serena Korda

Untitled handkerchief by Clare Qualmann

'One thing. Anything. Two things. Many things.' (A playground chant recorded in Bethnal Green in 1972 by Mike Talbot.) by Mike Berners-Winters.

Brown Spotted Mouse by Billy Childish.

Over: Protestation Handkerchief

2009-04-08T14:09:00.004+01:00

I made this Protestation Handkerchief for a group exhibition called 'Flash Company': a handkerchief show at Cecil Sharp House, curated by Matthew Cowan. The exhibition is open from 30th April 2009 until 28th June 2009. There is more information about the exhibition on the Flash Company blog. The English Folk Dance and Song Society news page also has information about the exhibition, and EFDSS generally.

Unfolding 'Over: Protestation Handkerchief'

2009-04-08T14:03:00.010+01:00

Balaclava Women and Other Portraits

2009-03-20T15:54:00.009Z

A selection of my drawings and paintings - 'Balaclava Women and Other Portraits' - is currently being exhibited at Bishopsgate Dental Care, 36 Spital Square, London, E1 6DY (phone 020 7377 6762)

My recent series of drawings – the Balaclava Women – are portraits of women wearing balaclavas and other head coverings (see blog entries below). I’m interested in how women conceal and reveal themselves, and the cultural ambiguities of wearing a headscarf, hat or balaclava. These portraits are drawn with pencil on ‘Rips’ cigarette papers – I use this ephemeral and fragile material, at a tiny scale, for many of my drawings as it underlines the intimacy and vulnerability of the subject matter. Also represented at Bishopsgate are two drawings from my series of Suffragette Portraits, a subject that, for me, resonates strongly today, particularly in the violence conducted with and to women’s own bodies. Two miniature oil paintings of women with bird-feather-like hair and downcast eyes simultaneously attract our attention, but also exclude us. My work explores an ongoing interest in portraiture used to convey the conflict between our public and our hidden, inaccessible interior life.

2009-03-20T15:53:00.001Z

Portrait eyes down (blue), oil paint on board.

Portrait eyes down (red), oil paint on wood.

Anonymous Suffragette, pencil on paper, framed.

Anonymous Suffragette (blue), coloured pencil on paper, framed.

For pictures of the 'Balaclava Women' exhibited at Bishopsgate Dental Care see my earlier posts of 'Balaclava Women', or click on the label 'balaclava' in the label list.

Recriminations/Menacing Napkins

2009-03-13T11:25:00.008Z

I made a set of ten Recriminations/Menacing Napkins for Hovel, Michael Curran's new project. In the aftermath of Hovel's inaugural event, The Birthday Party, (during which my first set of ten Menacing Napkins were distributed/destroyed/grubbied with cake) artists returned to the space to deposit and install new work for the forthcoming Hovel Exhibition.
You can see my first set of Menacing Napkins on earlier blog posts, and more images of Hovel events on my flickr site

Nothing Left Napkin

2009-03-13T11:04:00.001Z

You've Had It Napkin

2009-03-13T11:03:00.001Z

Take It Away Napkin

2009-03-13T11:02:00.003Z

Over Napkin

2009-03-13T11:02:00.002Z

That's The Last Slice Napkin 2

2009-03-13T11:01:00.001Z

You Can't

2009-03-13T10:58:00.006Z

No More Of It Napkin

2009-03-13T10:48:00.002Z

Too Much Napkin

2009-03-13T10:45:00.003Z

No More napkin

2009-03-13T10:42:00.004Z

Do It Again napkin

2009-03-13T10:39:00.001Z

Menacing Napkins

2009-03-02T21:42:00.000Z

I created a set of ten Menacing Napkins (see below) for Birthday Party, the inaugural event of Michael Curran's Hovel project, which took place on Saturday 28th February 2009. Each Menacing Napkin was folded and served to guests/performers with a slice of the three-tiered iced chocolate cake made by Serena Korda. I think most of the napkins headed for a gooey smeared crumpled end. There may be some relics lurking amongst the detritus of the Birthday Party...or perhaps some escaped as impromptu Party Bags for an extra slice/lump of cake to take home...There are more pictures from the evening on my Flickr Site.

Hovel Cake and Napkins

2009-03-02T21:20:00.004Z

Too Much Napkin

2009-03-02T14:16:00.002Z

That's Your Lot Napkin

2009-03-02T14:14:00.001Z

That's The Last Slice Napkin

2009-03-02T14:13:00.003Z

None For You Napkin

2009-03-02T14:11:00.001Z

It'll Make You Fat Napkin

2009-03-02T14:10:00.002Z

Finished Napkin

2009-03-02T14:04:00.001Z

Don't Have Any Napkin

2009-03-02T14:02:00.001Z

Don't Do It Napkin 2

2009-03-02T14:00:00.001Z

Don't Do It Napkin

2009-03-02T13:58:00.001Z

And Napkin

2009-03-02T13:55:00.002Z

Showflat Raffle Results

2009-02-28T15:19:00.000Z

*** Announcement ***

The Showflat raffle winner is Barnaby Hewlett, pictured below receiving his prize. He won this framed Balaclava Woman drawing, in pencil on cigarette paper, one of a series of six drawings of different Balaclava wearing-women. The raffle was drawn on Sunday 15th February 2009 at the Brown Food Afternoon, the closing event of my exhibition The Sky is Always Blue, The Grass is Always Green.

Brown Food Spread

2009-02-28T15:03:00.003Z