Review of Alison Moore’s Novel – Missing

Alison Moore: Missing, Salt Publishing 2018

I am a huge fan of Alison Moore’s writing but I have been knocked out by the sheer brilliance of her latest book, Missing.  The wonderful sparse use of language, everyday language to build a sense of place, character, unease, is nothing short of wonderful.  Her interest in signs, the words that we encounter everyday are rendered weird and stifling, it makes you question their meaning and the intention behind their use. In that use of words she is the new Ali Smith, in the sense of the uncanny, she is the new Hilary Mantel, think Beyond Black, (yes Missing is as disturbing as that!) but in a quiet understated way, the way that gets beneath your skin, that leaves you wondering whether your own creaks are something more.. something sinister, not just projections.

The book moves from Hawick in Scotland, to Carlisle, and the Cambridgeshire fens, all marginal places all teetering on the edge of otherness, all strange and not fully formed but in Moore’s hands wordscapes, splaces (my invented words) where one might have been but know are best avoided.  The central character traverses these places carrying a burden, but also strangely oblivious to some of its ramifications especially for others.

I don’t want to write one of those irritating reviews which is nothing more than a precis of a story, because I hate being told too much or everything about a book/film/play.  Besides which I think that that kind of review is lazy, anyone can precis.  What I want is to whet your appetite to go a buy this book and read it for yourself.

Foucault’s Double

Foucault’s Double video artwork

 

This artwork of mine explores notions of family, legacy and looking, in Diego Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas (in the Prado Museum)

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The painting is a curious mixture of shifting reference points where the subject and viewer swap places ‘infinitely’ as they observe the painter watching them, watching the princess and her courtiers, while her parents form a ghostlike image caught in a mirror behind them, perhaps observing all. For me this picture also points to the replacement of parents by their offspring and foretells our/their mortality.

The work utilises a chapter by Michel Foucault from his book The Order of Things to form the basis for a discursive script. The Foucault essay discusses the painting from a non-art historical perspective relating what is being observed in the collection of figures to the position of the viewer. I have précised the chapter and found better words from those in the standard translation from French to English to provide better understanding.

As a counter point to the narration, I have interwoven sections from the last interview Foucault gave shortly before his death. In this interview he discuses the role of the philosopher in relation to politics. His statements are more confrontational and I hope by using them that they yank the listener back into the here and now and out of the realm of the painting. The combined text has then been broken up to form a three voice script which tries to capture the oscillation been viewing perspectives which is evident in the painting.

For the visual element of the work I have filmed the painting with a microscope camera, moving it around the composition much they same as our eyes move around an image. The places it alights are random and flit back and forth to anchors or common reference points. The resulting images are layered to provide occasional synergy with the narration, but not so much that it becomes a close confluence of word and image – that would be too literal. Rather, the discontinuities allow new conversations to occur in the mind and eyes of the viewer.

The voices I used were a poet, Christopher Hamilton-Emery, who has a lovely Manchester accent, a singer and actor, David Morris-Johnston, and my own.   (The other voice I wanted was not available on the day of the recording.) The recording was done at the same time for all parts so that the same ambience was consistent throughout the audio. The differences in light and shade between the voices is hoped to provide the listener with variety and to develop the energy sometimes lacking from a one-voice script.

My use of non-literary words is an attempt to fuse the lecture and the documentary into a new form of artwork. By combing them in what I call the docu-lecture, I try to tease out additional meaning in a mixture of text and image. This hybrid art form is for me still a work in progress. I welcome any comment and feedback. (I began my exploration of its potential in my artwork film – The Lecture as Palimpsest – https://vimeo.com/138198229 where I took a lecture by the former spy Anthony Blunt mixed it with a statement he gave to the press when his past actions as a spy became public.)

Review of The Good Son by Paul McVeigh

The Good Son by Paul McVeigh

Set in Ardoyne, a mainly catholic district of North Belfast, during the troubles in the 1970s, the story follows Mickey Donnelly, one summer as he prepares to leave junior school and across the holidays before he starts at a secondary. The book is well crafted with a poetic (in all senses of the word) that infuses every line. The voice is magical and lyrical offering subtle rhythm and momentum that makes it hard to put down.

The sense of time and place are directly and fondly drawn without excluding. The sense of love is real, the sense of danger likewise, but both mediated through the eyes of this ‘about to be’ man.

Mickey’s position as a catholic, in a city and a time divided, where streets are bastions of either side of a religious chasm, separated by derelict stretches of no man’s land. Intoxicatingly described and observed they are both terrifying and funny. And McVeigh paints examples of both good and bad on either side, whether it’s the brave bald rescuer of the children on the bus passing through a protestant area or the bullying parent of an IRA friend of his sisters. There is damnation and redemption apportioned sparingly so that neither side misses out, albeit that this is written from the catholic perspective.

With tragedy and loss the young Mickey navigates a difficult terrain – the onset of adolescence and the realisation that all young people face, that of recognition of difference.

It would be wrong to call this a ‘coming of age’ novel, because that would not do it justice, it is so much better than that. But there is in McVeigh the possibility of becoming the new Edmund White, but a White for the twenty-first century and McVeigh’s sense of restraint in his writing together with a refusal to sentimentalise casts him as a potential literary force to be reckoned with.

 

Gregory Hayman July 2016

 

 

 

 

 

Bishop’s Art Prize, Norwich, UK

I’ve been very fortunate to be shortlisted for the Bishop’s Art Prize for my video artwork Sun Under Water – which can be seen by copying the link below into your browser, or in situ in the exhibition at Norwich Cathedral until Sunday. 

This film presents the evocation of water without water actually being present in the source material. As a key element, water is essential for life as we know it, and has to be present for life to exist. This film turns that on its head and suggests water by its absence – a water that is seen and heard, but in the realm of the virtual and signified.

The film came about from work looking at the sun, and the power and life giving support supplied by the sun. Of course, water and the sun are incompatible, sunlight vaporises water and yet our world and life depends on both in harmony. Streams of living water flow down through time and space and exist in tension to the heat and radiating power of the sun.

In this film, I submerge technology used to capture energy from the sun under water, hinting at a reversal of power, but one, like the film which exists in the virtual world only.

On making an entrance – a film based on the poem by Chris Emery

The films Damaged Enamel and On Making an Entrance are 2 films that form a trilogy responding to the poems of Chris Emery. Damaged Enamel also draws on sculptural work I have made based on bathroom furniture (baths, sinks, hand basins, dryers) and so overlaps with other contextual discourses that underpin those works.

The thinking behind the exposition of both these films relates to the ones for reading poems I describe in my reflection about the treatment for the poem George’s Song. For all three I have used computer-generated voices rather than real ones. The visual elements of this film is far simpler than for George’s Song.

On Making an Entrance film still from the poem by Chris Emery. image: Gregory Hayman

For On making an entrance was much more straightforward, I wanted to see whether I could use a titles effect to deliver the words of the poem. But I have played with the usual placing of this Star Wars type title. It is more of an end title sequence and I have turned that around to suggest beginning (Making an Entrance). This was because the poem had a filmic or cinematic quality to it and I wanted to reflect that in the filmed element of my work. The voice has a West Coast American accent and I thought that worked well with the cinematic elements too.

In terms of showing the work, I feel the Making an Entrance deserves a cinematic screen to give full effect to the 3D animation of the titles for words. Damaged Enamel is far more of an interior piece and could be shown on a small monitor or projected into a bathroom space or even onto an area of porcelain.

George’s Song – a video artwork

George’s Song – this artwork is the first of my responses to a collaboration with the poet Chris Emery. The poem is a non-narrative, textural poem. I did not want to film elements as they appear in the poem, even though this might have been one option, rather, I preferred to cogitate on the poem and over a series of readings began to develop a feeling for it, within the language of film and using elements I had experimented with previously in film works of art.

There were lines that suggested the act of looking or observing, and I thought about sensory organs–the eyes–that enable this to happen. I also wanted to avoid the poems being read either by the poet or actors or indeed anyone who might distract from the words by imbibing them with emotion or a poetic resonance. I have very strong feelings about the reading of poetry and particularly hate the declamatory or singsongy style with which some poems are read out loud. Witness the current debate that was sparked by the poet Carol Ann Duffy reading one of her own poems on the Today Programme on BBC Radio 4. (I think people agree that she is a very fine poet, but that her reading of her own poems does not always do them justice). The computer-generated voice I used avoided any meaning or emotion being placed on the words or the poems; the words are merely sounded as words together and for me begin to let the poem and indeed the poet speak for them.

The decision to film a part of the body, the lips, and use the mouth for eyes in a stitch together film, was made because I wanted to link the act of observing with the act of speaking the poem. The use of the sprout (the green object acting as eyeball) was a response to the phrase in the poem about the ‘measled grapes’; I didn’t want a measled grape – even if I had one.

I think the film works well with or without sound (but I do need to think about how audio reverberates in some locations and that headphones might be a solution in some locations). The film produced a variety of reactions from disgust, to laughter, and curiosity, and as such, worked well. It prompted discussion and discourse and its exposition largely met most of what I had hoped it would achieve.

The Grantchester Pottery Paints the Stage – Exhibition Review

Jerwood Encounters, Jerwood Space, London

 

Granchester Pottery Paints the Stage

It is heartening to see contemporary artists revisit a neglected era of British art, so I was especially pleased to visit the latest exhibition at the Jerwood Space in London. The Grantchester Pottery Paints the Stage is an exhibition drawing partly on the output of the Roger Fry led Omega Workshops that began in 1913 in the Fitzrovia part of London, and partly on Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) the Slovenian collective with a more political and libertarian agenda.   The exhibition is curated by Granchester Pottery founders Phil Root & Giles Round, who have brought together an impressive ensemble of artists working across a diverse range of practices from painting and printmaking to sculpture and textiles. It might have been tempting to merely pastiche an earlier phenomenon in the exposition of this display, but the intelligent curating has contrived to make a theatrical hang of the work and thus provided something totally new.

Upon entering the gallery space you are immediately struck by the unconventional hang. No walls are used to display the pictures or other 2-D work; instead, all the work is hung across the middle of the room. Your first view is of the reverse of the majority of the canvasses, as if you were entering the rear of a stage set. It is only when you turn around at the far wall, as if you were the audience sitting in the stalls, do you see the complete hang like a range of stage scenery flats and props. This perspective gives you a view of artworks of various sizes so that you see the whole of some and parts of others receding toward the point where you entered the gallery. It makes for a tremendously exciting and interactive experience where the artworks are dialoguing with each other in an unusual way.

The Granchester Pottery Paints the Stage

Another element of the stage design is the use of cast iron stage weights, which traditionally are used to secure flats and scenery. In this exhibition they anchor some of the paintings, both large scale and small ones. The stage weights also become sculptural objects in their own right, not just anchoring works but becoming metaphorical grounding for the discourse the exhibition is giving voice to.

The Granchester Pottery Paints the Stage

The other interesting point about the hang is that you are asked to contemplate the reverse side of the paintings and 2-D works in a way you never would if they were lying flat against a wall. This makes you think about them as not just paintings but additionally, as sculptural objects. As you navigate the canvas stretchers you get glimpses of the size and the under-painting seen from the rear, as well as the weave of the canvas itself. Having to walk around the paintings also makes you consider them longer than you would if you were just navigating work along a wall. It also puts you on the stage as a direct protagonist within the artwork. The viewer is no longer merely a spectator but a player too. This is an interesting conceit, and the immersion in this decorative environment asks you to consider all of the applied art traditions, which is entirely what the Omega Workshops were endeavouring to do.

Speaking to Giles Round about the exhibition, he said that he wanted people to enter the exhibition and see the backs of the work or rather, that the artworks would be ‘turned away’ from the viewer. I liked the notion of the artworks turning away from the viewer in an act of conscious modesty or reticence. The works do not show themselves in all their splendour immediately and it implies that the audience might have to coax them round to reveal themselves. Again this indicates that the curators Giles and Phil wanted the audience to experience the work in a more active and less passive way.

Dietmar Lutz painting: Interior World

Another element borrowed from the Omega workshops was that no work was labelled or attributed to an individual artist. Had the curators carried this idea to its logical conclusion then there would not have been a printed gallery guide identifying artists with individual artworks. As it was, it appeared that no works were for sale, at least I could see no indication of purchasing opportunity, and so I’m guessing that this left purchase open to discussion. The other thought might be that the exhibition is travelling and therefore the curators did not want to break up the show on its first outing.

The highlights of the show were the work of Dietmar Lutz whose large bold expressive paintings are theatrical and introspective at the same time. Lutz, is a Dusseldorf based artist whose use of paint sometimes resembles Hockney at his best, but is also very much contemporary German/Middle European in his fluid translucence. His two canvases embrace the modern and the theme of the show, with one (Sophie in the pottery café) being of the fellow artist Sophie von Hellermann at work making pots, in much the same way that the Omega artists (and then Bloomsbury Group) painted each other. The other painting Interior World hints at the domesticity and is a reference to the decorative nature of the antecedents for the show, but yet it also suggests that the world may be a stage set calling to mind the one designed for the Stephen Daldry production of the J. B. Priestley play An Inspector Calls.

The Granchester Pottery Paints the Stage

Michael Fullerton’s Marillyn Hewson painting has a deft use of paint and is somewhat reminiscent of Gwen John’s style, harking back to an era slightly earlier but connected to the Omega Workshops one. Fullerton’s use of closely related tones gives the painting a timeless feeling and whilst smaller than Lutz’s canvasses, it holds its own due to its ethereal intensity.

The anonymous works, attributed merely to the Granchester Pottery, are all decorative and beguiling; from folding screens deeply reminiscent of the abstract designed ones produced by the Omega Workshops; and striking large printed banners hanging from ceiling to floor with abstract cross-hatched designs calling to mind some of the Vanessa Bell dust jackets for her sister Virginia Woolf’s books. Grantchester Pottery works also include a table, chairs and of course pottery and textiles.

The Granchester Pottery Paints the Stage

The exhibition avoids a slavish homage to Omega by including a range of other artists whose work is very much of the moment from Edwin Pickstone’s digital print Type Dump to Maria Loboda’s the beautiful banker – a collection of pillows made from suit fabrics in a languid stack with mercifully none of the attempt to give them a sense of tension – something over used these days in sculptural pieces using soft-filled objects. Rather her pillows are draped over each other, spooning or perhaps even smothering each other in a brave display.

 

The Exhibition is on from 6 January – 22 February 2015
, Jerwood Space, 171 Union St, London SE1 0LN
 Mon-Fri 10am–5pm, Sat/Sun 10am–3pm Free


Southwark, London Bridge or Borough jerwoodvisualarts.org

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stones and the death of Virginia Woolf – thoughts behind my film

Stones, Gregory Hayman 2014

Stones

This film was inspired by a found sculpture with stones in a Perspex box attached to a telegraph pole. When I shook the pole the stones bobbed about. Their movement interested me as stones are usually inanimate and we don’t see them move, bar the odd rock fall in mountainous places.

I filmed them in situ and the result was disappointing as I had too much camera judder and background noise that was distracting. It was hard to imagine that I would retrieve anything from my poor rushes and I had no other chance of filming them. I resolved to make something similar in my studio and film that. But in the meantime, I decided to use the footage I had got to make a prototype of the film. I felt that this would assist the construction of the piece so that the shots I got were appropriate for my intended outcome. I didn’t get around to making the stones piece as time intervened, so I made use of the film I had shot.

While I as doing this, someone had posted online a piece about the only known recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice. I know the recording from my time at the British Library, where they had used it in a collection of writers’ voices on a CD. Funnily enough, I had recently been watching the wonderful film The Hours based on the book by Michael Cunningham. I commented to a friend about how interesting Woolf’s voice was and what a surprise too. I had expected her to sound frail and timorous given her history of mental illness. I could not have been more wrong – Woolf sounded confident and in control.

Thinking about Woolf’s death (seen at the start of the film of The Hours), I then thought about Woolf filling her pockets with stones to weigh herself down.   She committed suicide by drowning in the river Ouse near her home, Monk’s House, in Rodmell, Sussex. It seemed that my film of stones and Woolf’s voice might work together well. The stones nodding movement appears to be mocking and taunting as the bob silently and pointlessly. Woolf’s voice talks about the use of words and language. I have been reading about how memories are dependent upon language and I have been trying to make forgettable artworks. I wondered whether this combination of an essay on words by Woolf and the silent overlooked stones might be forgettable or at the very least, deal with some of the issues around forgetting.

Screen Grab from the film Stones, 2014

The film I made has a soporific quality. The stones do nothing except gently move and the voice intones in grand old-fashioned English about the use of words. The words roll down from the past but fail to resonate deeply. They become a vehicle for a wider meditation but fail to gather moss.

Does the film succeed? On some level it is packed with zero incident (sic) and as such, is hard to watch all the way through. Should I be concerned about this? No not really. I wanted something that might be forgettable and it incurs feelings of boredom and drowsiness, a bit like slipping into unconsciousness through carbon monoxide poisoning, or becoming unconscious as the water fills your lungs.

Framing what we see and what we might remember – an introduction to a film

Confined, Gregory Hayman 2014

Confined/Contained a film

This film is about looking and how things frame what we see. It takes, as its premise, the idea that we are always looking at things through something else, be it a window, building, people, trees, glasses, and screens. If we consider this as given, then framing must to some extent dictate what we see.

The past is also framed by events and its distance in time from where we are. The gatekeepers of the collective memory also frame the past, whether they are historians, politicians, the media and mythmakers. Even the present is subject to the framing of many contingent factors. Our brains also frame things in the selections they make, suggesting that memories are not deliberate but contextualised. Even how we feel about things – whether they are perceived to be good, or bad, is an act of framing. So it might also be presumed that what we forget is also framed by our brains because the act of forgetting suggests that something is disconnecting an experience to render it unnecessary or unworthy of storing.

My film Confined looks through fissures in rusty, corroding metal objects, glimpsing a world beyond. Or so it appears. It could be that the landscape beyond is the object of contemplation in the film. But, it could be that the interior of the boxes and the apertures are the thing being looked at. It is not clear from the point of view of the audience watching the film. And through that slippage lies some of its meaning. Is it the framed we are seeing or the frame?

So is the viewer being tricked into thinking that the subject of the film might be the landscape beyond the boxes? It becomes apparent that this is not the case as the camera does not come to rest on the distant shore line, but instead a couple of grass heads and a fly which alights onto one of them near to the boxes. There is no reveal, no crescendo to wrap the film up. It ends on the incidental the unmemorable.

The film was conceived as an attempt to make another forgettable artwork. It could be seen, as a piece about place or space, but it is not. Although, it does use the language of artworks concerned with place. One viewer believed they saw a building at one point, although none is in the landscape seen.   Incidental things happen which can be elevated to the level of significance because of the lack of event in the film, but these again are incidental, like the myriad of small things which we see and forget each hour of everyday.

The film is an attempt to tempt the viewer with something which turns out to be nothing at all, merely the act of looking and listening, the random elevated to the level of art. A frame.

The sound for the film is supposed to be like the sound of the rusty metal interspersed with what appear to be bird song, with jarring repeated bursts of indecipherable percussive noises. The sound is supposed to dislocate from the glimpses of landscape to suggest something industrial perhaps or unreal, an echo of a memory of a soundscape. The sound also acts as a framing devise, albeit, one that was no physical manifestation.

In these senses therefore, I attempt to offer something about memories which bleed though the fissures of the mind to reveal partial glimpses, partial renditions of moments seen but mostly forgotten or not elevated to the status of memories, not burned onto the recallable archives within the brain.

Review of Little Egypt by Lesley Glaister, Salt Publishing 2014

Lesley Glaister, Salt Publishing, 2014

Little Egypt is a house belonging to two fanatical amateur Egyptologists in 1920s England. The husband and wife owners abandon their two children to search for a tomb on the West Bank of the Nile. The story traces the lives of their two children, a sister and brother, who left behind, have to make their own reality from the tangled remains of the house and their parent’s obsession.

Written from the point of view of Sissy (Isis), the story focuses on her childhood and coming of age. It is a story about a world within a world where an Asperger’s–like tunnel vision has far-reaching consequences for others. It is also a story about betrayal, betrayal of trust by the parents towards their children, and betrayal by those who see passion as a route to profit.

It is a bleak world where those that provide love are without the ability to embrace it and save themselves and others. No character will find love and adult relationships are denied the two children, who might remain cyphers of a dead religion.

The book is also about isolation. At the heart of the story are four people, Isis and Osiris, her brother, their housekeeper and their uncle. All fail to realise relationships and in failing to so, remain victims and alone.

To an extent, Little Egypt mocks the idea of Egypt proper. Egypt is teeming with people, myriad people, people down the ages, all dependent upon one another, all living and dying and being buried atop one another. But Little Egypt’s is beyond people and the real world, a gothic setting that contains the majority of the action. Little Egypt is also a mausoleum, literally and metaphorically for a past and for an obsession, where the living are as hopelessly and gloriously entombed as the Egyptian dead. In this rarefied setting, the contents of the house are as helpful to the inhabitants as the contents of King Tut’s tomb are to a mythical afterlife. In a way, an afterlife is all the hope that this novel offers because the lived life for all is bleak and ultimately transactional.

The prose is concise and uncluttered. The period detail unforced and gave a sense of time and was particularly evident in the touching moments between Sissy and the housekeeper sharing information about household skills.   I was left wondering whether it was a story about ciphers or whether the story was the cipher. Did it need a Rosetta Stone to decode it? I’ll let other readers decide.