Home Grown | The F.E. McWilliam Gallery & Studios | Banbridge | County Down

Text by Angela Darby

Since its inception in 2008 The F.E. McWilliam Gallery has gained an impressive reputation for programming important retrospectives of Irish Modernists and innovative thematic exhibitions. The latest project entitled Home Grown consists of 26 selected artists who have an association to the Banbridge region either through birth or domicile. The curators Dr Riann Coulter and Aoife Ruane, Director of the Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda invited selected artists to "create work in response to the themes of momentum, energy, experience or connection." Within this thematic context the collective works feature a significant contribution from established, internationally known and emerging artists.

Paddy Bloomer's sculpture and video installation The Home Grown Rocket (2011) responds to the destructive removal of whin bushes (gorse), which is seen as a weed within the local farming community. The artist presents an ironic, albeit humorous solution to this discarded vegetation by converting it into rocket propellant. The viewer watches captivated as Bloomer demonstrates step by step how to manufacture and build the rocket using the discarded bushes, a gas cylinder and an empty fire extinguisher. Inevitably the rocket explodes mid-air after launching itself into the sky. Both the artist and the viewer share a brief moment of jubilation at this successful result but as the remnants of the rocket hang futilely in the gallery space there is an epiphany in relation to the concept of the Home Grown Rocket: in the production of energy through the destruction of natural resources, obliteration is the only conclusion.

The relationship of the artist to the town's cartography is a recurring subject explored throughout the exhibition. In Fortress, the artist Robert Peters considers the distorting nature of fear by taking an urban myth from his past in which a concrete block was dropped on someone’s head and merges this with the town's political reputation during the 1970s. Fear dominated the towns’ growth as inhabitants moved there to escape intimidation in neighboring border towns. The artist maps out the borderline of the town with raw materials such as nails and garden string that have then been connected and weighted to a concrete breezeblock. In the work Route to Root by Joanne Proctor, the lines and symbols of the town's map are drawn with ink and intricately embroidered with strands of the artist's own hair. Throughout the duration of the show Proctor methodically sketched the complex microscopic details of a magnified strand of her hair on a large sheet of paper attached to the gallery's wall. The physical interaction of mapping an external space is interwoven with Proctor’s DNA. In A Moment in Time and Route to Root there is a delicate sense of ownership in relation to the environment that the artist inhabits and navigates.

The physicality of knowledge can also be seen in the impressive works by Michael Hanna. His graphite wall drawing What a Friend is formed from the International Phonetic Alphabet, which provides symbols representing all the sounds that can be produced by the human vocal tract. The artists tells us that he is "...interested in using the IPA in my work as it is an international 'language' that does not in itself enable international communication, only analysis". Hanna also displays foam sculptures formally presented within a glass cabinet. Each of the objects’ abstract forms references the key physical components involved in speech: pressure, lubrication, volume/space and flesh. In both cases scientific reductionism replaces meaning with isolated mechanics. In stark contrast to Hanna’s work, Patrick Calhoun presents Foundling a sculptural installation comprised of 25 ceramic heads situated on the gallery floor. Each of the heads poignantly represents a symbolic stage in the artist’s life. The works seem to either ascend or descend out of or into the gallery floor on which they have been placed. Calhoun has severed the heads below the nose rendering them mouth less and this deliberate muteness seems to communicate a melancholic state of reflection. Mark Revels effectively portrays a similar sense of claustrophobic despondency in two small alluring bronze hemispheres on which minute houses are repeated in a pattern of circular, never ending grids.

The relationship to the Banbridge locale is apparent in the works by Jasper McKinney, Mark McGreevy, Joanne Walker and Martin McParland. In the oil painted triptych entitled Yellow Hill to Mutton Hill I, II, III McKinney’s narrative is one of memory as he marries together symbols that represent an historical self-reflection. In the work by McParland entitled Assembling Line the artist focuses on a distant memory of a shoe factory once located opposite the F.E. McWilliam building and is now the site of redevelopment. Through the application of enamel paint on glass the factory’s exterior has been rendered as a fading silhouette; only the shadow of a memory remains.

Artists Dougal McKenzie, Eddie Rafferty, Millie Moore and Lisa Castagner have chosen to exhibit works from their own individual practices. McKenzie’s impressive series of oil on linen paintings reflect upon the political subtext of the Munich Olympics and questions our assumptions within the broader context of the "Games". Eddie Rafferty chooses to document points in a timeline taking his experiences in South Africa as inspiration. An epic moment from the 2010 World Cup, a maidservant in a suburban home and the cliental of a café in Pretoria are all portrayed with accomplished dexterity. The interviewed subject of Castagner’s video documentary Courage, A Heart and A Brain presents an insight into a man obsessed with icons from fantasy films and television programs. His vast collection of non-Caucasian dolls and related ephemera reveal an attraction and preference for African cultures. His enthusiastic commentary and pride in describing each of his collections provides the viewer with a strong impression of the subject’s personality.

With Home Grown, the curators’ courageous decision to seek out artists with association to a specific place has proven to be a valid approach. The quality of the works on display ensures that the exhibition relates to a wide audience beyond the Banbridge location.

Home Grown, The F.E McWilliam Gallery and Studios, 200 Newry Road, Banbridge, County Down, BT32 3NB. www.femcwilliam.com

Aesthetica in Print

If you only read Aesthetica online, you're missing out. The December/January issue of Aesthetica offers a diverse range of features from The Way We Live Now, which is on at the Design Museum, London, to Anselm Kiefer opening at Tel Aviv Museum of Art, to a look at Danser Sa Vie at Pompidou Centre, which examines the place dance holds in art history. Plus it comes with its very own DVD of short films from the Aesthetica Short Film Festival.

If you would like to buy this issue, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Better yet call +44 (0) 1904 629 137 or visit the website to subscribe to Aesthetica for a year and save 20% on the printed magazine.

Captions:
Lisa Castagner, Courage, A Heart and A Brain, Video Still
Paddy Bloomer, Home Grown Rocket, video Still
Paddy Bloomer, Home Grown Rocket, Installation Shot
All Courtesy of FE McWilliam gallery

The Archaeology of Place | Zarina Bhimji | Whitechapel Gallery | London

Text by Emma Cummins

Spanning 25 years of a practice embedded in historical and empirical research, Zarina Bhimji portrays buildings and architectural surfaces as “protagonists” in an unpeopled, yet politically charged landscape of violence, migration and complex, colonial histories. Opening with two black and white seascapes and a vast selection of prints from the series Love (1998-2007), the exhibition segues from hazy horizons in Zanzibar, to abandoned residences and bullet encrusted walls in Uganda, with an ostensibly effortless sweep.

Belying the political complexity of Bhimji’s work, the depth and aesthetic texture of images such as Bullet Riddled (2001-2006) - where a decontextualised cell reveals traces of missile attacks among the anonymous scrawl of absent inhabitants - distances the viewer from social or historical specificities. As such, a strangely unsentimental tone pervades the walls of the Whitechapel Gallery in an exhibition where themes of loss, betrayal and political violence seethe ominously beneath the surface of buildings and terrestrial landscapes.

As loci of a colonial past, riddled with bullet holes, cobwebs and a cast of anonymous objects; the buildings Zarina Bhimji chooses to capture, on 35mm film or through various photographic techniques, exist in a seductively, precarious present. Imbued with the vestigial traces of history and personal memory, sites such as Entebbe Airport in Uganda – a site reminiscent of Idi Amin’s 1972 decree to expel 80,000 Ugandans of Asian descent - silently suffer the forces of material entropy and human abandonment, while asserting their presence as intriguing, contemporaneous objects.

Absent from the works themselves, details of the sites’ political significance are revealed in wall texts that, while offering insights into Bhimji’s ambiguous practice, do not encumber the viewer with history or unequivocal fact. Framed instead by aesthetic and atmospheric conditions - such as quality of colour and light - Bhimji’s architecturally grounded works refuse to succumb to the logics of narrative or documentation that often shape research-led artistic practices.

As T.J.Demos suggests, Bhimji’s research is "extensive", however "[i]f anything, her work is informed by the blockage of information, as much as it results from the collection of historical research". Harking back to the violence of Amin’s despotic regime, of which Bhimji and her family were victims, works such as Yellow Patch (2011) quietly contemplate the "echoes" of facts and political events without recourse to testimony or pedagogical language.

Taking centre stage in both the gallery itself and the exhibition’s beautifully illustrated catalogue; this immersive, 35mm colour film takes the history of trade and migration between India and Africa as a point of departure. Honing in on a few key locations across the Indian sub-continent, we see lifeless interiors littered with bundles of bureaucratic documents and items of deteriorating furniture; the once grand confines of houses and Victorian offices in Gujarat and the Port Trust of Bombay; elegiac scenes of the desert landscape of the Rann of Kutch, and glimpses of the Indian Ocean near the port of Mandvi.

Punctuated by a panoply of sounds; the sound of birdsong and violins seeping smoothly into the patter of footsteps, rain, or fragments of political speeches, Yellow Patch is an unusually mesmerizing film – its ambiguity affording a feeling of relaxation and visual absorption, despite the ghostly presence of past cruelties and imperial brutality.

With a poignancy and elegance unrivalled by Bhimji’s still photographic works, Yellow Patch glides through once-significant sites of human activity and colonial administration that today are but relics of a complex and unfathomably violent past. Captured with a "painterly" refinement, these rolling images of objects, architecture and interior spaces collide with heterotopic depictions of a present-day harbour in Mandvi. In the film’s final scene, we see wild dogs roam the port’s slate-coloured sands amidst the skeletons of dhows (wooden boats that are still constructed today). Unlike the disused buildings and forgotten documents portrayed earlier in the film, these colossal vessels appear to be under construction – creaking loudly in the windswept desolation of the beach.

As a wilfully ambiguous epilogue, the scene seems to enforce the primacy and persistence of the present in sites saturated with history and painful memory. In turn, the gallery’s decision to focus less on Bhimji’s preoccupation with the past, and more on her fascination with the contemporaneous presence of old buildings and historical objects, reinforces the artist’s assertion that her "…work is not about the actual facts but about the echo they create, the gestures and the sound."

Through both sensitive use of text and quotations, and a deliberately anachronistic ordering of works (which create a kind of tapestry, rather than a chronological survey), the Whitechapel Gallery has managed – like Bhimji herself – to distance these works from notions of biography or personal catharsis.

Sharing the fate of thousands of Ugandan citizens, Bhimji’s displaced citizenship is an implicit strand that colours her work and bleeds through the walls of the gallery. Rather than tones of anguish or fury however, a sense of possibility and oxymoronic beauty permeates this very nuanced exploration of the sites, buildings and structures of power that have shaped the artist’s conception of self. In turn, the exhibition is both captivating as an aesthetic experience, and provocative in its intellectual and ontological connotations. Far from fetishising the objects of political or personal pasts, Zarina Bhimji is defined by a curiosity with the gritty materiality of the present, its constant formal transformation, and its ability to transmit beauty despite the terrible histories it harbours, and the violence it conceals.

Aesthetica's December/January issue features History in Context, an extended piece on Zarina Bhimji's work by Charles Danby. You can buy a copy here.

Zarina Bhimji, Whitechapel Gallery, 19/01/12 - 09/03/12, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London, E1 7QX. www.whitechapelgallery.org

Aesthetica in Print

If you only read Aesthetica online, you're missing out. The December/January issue of Aesthetica offers a diverse range of features from The Way We Live Now, which is on at the Design Museum, London, to Anselm Kiefer opening at Tel Aviv Museum of Art, to a look at Danser Sa Vie at Pompidou Centre, which examines the place dance holds in art history. Plus it comes with its very own DVD of short films from the Aesthetica Short Film Festival.

If you would like to buy this issue, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Better yet call +44 (0) 1904 629 137 or visit the website to subscribe to Aesthetica for a year and save 20% on the printed magazine.

Captions:
1. Zarina Bhimji, Your Sadness is Drunk (2001-2006) Ilfochrome Ciba Classic Print
2. Zarina Bhimji, Shadows and Disturbances (2007) Ilfochrome Ciba Classic Print
3. Zarina Bhimji, Memories Were Trapped Inside the Asphalt (1998-2003) Transparency in Lightbox
4. Zarina Bhimji, Bapa Closed His Heart, It Was Over (2001-2006) Ilfochrome Ciba Classic Print
All images courtesy the artist

The Human Face of Climate Change | Last Days of the Arctic | Proud Chelsea | London

Last Days of the Arctic is a moving and insightful photographic portrait of a disappearing landscape and the Inuit people who inhabit it, by celebrated photojournalist Ragnar Axelsson. Inspired by the fast-diminishing way of life of communities dependent on nature and the land around them for survival, Axelsson presents us with a breathtaking introduction to a life of Greenlandic hunters in one of the most remote regions of the world, and at once demonstrates its temporality.

As the world turns its gaze towards the Arctic; the landscape whose inhabitants have done the least to cause climate change is where the devastating effects are most visible. Their ancient culture is set to become extinct; the probability of these communities continuing to live traditionally is becoming increasingly unlikely. In his native Iceland, Ragnar looked at the fishermen and farmers of remote villages and thought if he did not photograph them, no one would know they ever existed. It is this thought that has led to this unique body of work captured in Greenland, with unprecedented access to a community that rarely lets outsiders in.

Last Days of the Arctic, Proud Chelsea, 161 King's Road, London, SW1 5XP. www.proudonline.co.uk

Aesthetica in Print

If you only read Aesthetica online, you're missing out. The December/January issue of Aesthetica offers a diverse range of features from The Way We Live Now, which is on at the Design Museum, London, to Anselm Kiefer opening at Tel Aviv Museum of Art, to a look at Danser Sa Vie at Pompidou Centre, which examines the place dance holds in art history. Plus it comes with its very own DVD of short films from the Aesthetica Short Film Festival.

If you would like to buy this issue, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Better yet call +44 (0) 1904 629 137 or visit the website to subscribe to Aesthetica for a year and save 20% on the printed magazine.

Captions:
1. Drummers house, Kulusuk, East Greenland 2009
2. Girl in a swing, Tiniteqilaaq, East Greenland 1997
3. Horns, Uummannaq, West Greenland 1998
4. Dog in a window, Sermiliqaq, East Greenland 1997
All © Ragnar Axelsson