East End Review

Tag: Art and Design

  • Exhibition charts the punk history of Woodberry Down

    Reality Gap
    Reality Gap by Millie Guest

    It often seems as if no stone has been left unturned in documenting the history of Hackney’s famous Woodberry Down Estate.

    But just when you thought all the stories had been told, a self-proclaimed “diaspora of punks” who once squatted on the estate are adding their voices to the choir with an upcoming exhibition on its regeneration, entitled “They’ve Taken our Ghettos: A Punk History of the Woodberry Down Estate.”

    This mixed-media show will comprise of etchings, comics, photographs and graphics and will be exhibited in the gallery space of Craving Coffee, an independent coffee shop in Tottenham recently partnered with social enterprise scheme the Mill Co. Project.

    Woodberry Down’s colossal overhaul, which has seen one of the borough’s poorest housing estates transform into a mixed-tenure development with flats for sale at over £1million, prompted former squatter Rebecca Binns to coordinate an artistic response to the changing landscape.

    Contributors include graphic designer Kieran Plunkett, etcher Joe Ryan, whose submission examines the relationship between institutions and control and Mik Insect, comic artist, tattooist and guitarist in punk-squat band Coitus. All three squatted on Woodberry Down in the late eighties and early nineties.

    A collage entitled Reality Gap, which depicts Rebecca Binns in her first squat in a Haringey tower block aged 17 has also been submitted by web designer Millie Guest.

    Mobocracy by Kieron Plunkett
    Mobocracy by Kieron Plunkett

    Binns, who is a PhD candidate at University of the Arts London, researching the work of anarcho-punk band member and artist Gee Vaucher, told the East End Review she wanted to commemorate the estate’s alternative history “before it changes beyond recognition”.

    The title “they’ve taken our ghettos” is drawn from the title of one of Joe Ryan’s etchings. “I think it is meant to be a bit ironic,” explains Binns. “It was hard then. We stayed in houses unfit to live in and were moved on a lot. I guess Joe is reflecting on the fact that while they were far from ideal homes they provided something very important – a sense of community and freedom.”

    Like many asked to pass judgement on the redevelopment of Woodberry Down, Binns is ambivalent. She raises familiar concerns such as the management of the estate’s deterioration, residents’ unhappiness at the lack of social cohesion in the estate’s new ‘two-tier’ social structure and anger that leaseholders were not reimbursed at market rate for their properties.

    Conquest, Colonisation and Social Cleansing
    Conquest, Colonisation and Social Cleansing by Joe Ryan

    But Binns concedes that the council has “made an effort for it not to be a wholesale sell-off” and says it has tried to provide a decent component of social housing.

    Following the Manor House Development Trust’s ‘memory bank’ exhibition and extensive media coverage on the council’s flagship scheme, Binns hopes the show will give voice to the estate’s radical past.

    “I thought it would be a good idea to commemorate the alternative history of the estate. Ours is a different narrative,” she says.

    “They’ve Taken our Ghettos: A Punk History of the Woodberry Down Estate” is at Craving Coffee, The Mill Co. Project, Gaunson House, N15 4QQ until 26 July 

  • Appeal for artists to paint Lea Bridge Road mural

    Public art
    Site of proposed mural. Photograph: Lee Valley Regional Park Authority

    Artists are invited to apply to paint a neglected underpass under the Lea Bridge Road.

    The Lee Valley Regional Park Authority wants a community mural to be painted on the walls of a pedestrian tunnel that connects Leyton Marshes to the nature reserve by Hackney Marshes.

    The Park Authority claims the subway is the target of “vandalism and anti-social behaviour”, and wants to initiate a “community rejuvenation project” to transform the space.

    Alex Farris, Green Spaces Manager at Lee Valley Regional Park Authority said: “We’re very keen to be able to work with local talent in creating this mural and I hope to see many artists get in touch with us.

    “The underpass is well-used by residents and visitors and we want it to be inviting and a pleasant route.

    Lee Valley Regional Park Authority will work with the artists and local people in Waltham Forest and Hackney and run workshops to transform the space.

    Anyone who would like to apply for the commission should email a covering letter and CV citing examples of relevant work before Friday 3 July to procurement@leevalleypark.org.uk with the subject heading, ‘Leyton Marsh Art Project’.

  • Born to RUN: street artist becomes a political animal

    Detail from RUN
    Detail from RUN’s latest piece of street art in Lower Clapton

    To be ubiquitous on the streets yet elusive in person are two of the unwritten rules of street art.

    And Italian artist RUN ticks both boxes, his trademark hands and interlocking faces adorning walls everywhere from Shoreditch to the backstreets of Lower Clapton – yet he is known only by a pseudonym.

    A third rule – to have a socially engaged or political message – is something RUN never used to concern himself with.
    “The political statement is implicit in the act of painting on the street,” says the street artist.

    But a commission to re-do a painting in Clapton Passage, on the side wall of what is now a veterinary practice, changed things for the artist.

    RUN set out to paint some animals or something related to the natural world in the small passageway off Lower Clapton Road where his work has been visible for several years.

    After making a start he returned five or six times, adding something new to the artwork each time.
    Two days after the recent election, RUN was on his ladder finishing the piece off, when a member of the public seeing the artwork called up to him, shouting: “Ah-ha! It’s a banker! A banker on a lead!”

    RUN describes the finished piece as a man with a chain around his neck “looking like a raging animal under anaesthetic and crawling like all the animals of the forest and the savanna.”

    Airing political views in a public setting is breaking new ground for RUN, but instead of a feeling of release, the experience has brought with it some unfamiliar anxieties.

    “The message is not very hidden. It is pretty clear and obvious. But what is not obvious is the fear I have that the piece will be censored or deleted after someone complains,” RUN says.

    “This of course happens all the time and is not a big deal. But after this election I feel all the social places and artistic spaces that are made by people and not by associations or corporate brands will be soon taken away.”

    There is no evidence to suggest the new government will crack down on street art. Graffiti removal is, after all, the responsibility of councils rather than central government.

    But could a surprise by-product of the election be a flourishing of political art? For street artist RUN the writing – or the paint at least – is on the wall.

  • Food in Art – book review: a peek inside the great larder of art history

    Food in Art 620
    The Old Man of Artimino by Giovanna Garzoni, 1650. Courtesy of Galleria Palatina, Florence

    If it wasn’t so inconvenient to bring a chunky hardback art book on an Easyjet flight, I’d suggest Gillian Riley’s Food in Art: From Prehistory to the Renaissance as a ‘top holiday read of 2015’.

    A museum gift-shop buy with an academic styling, it doesn’t look or feel the part.

    But what better than to read up on the origins of pesto while lazing on the Italian coasts, or peek inside the tomb of the wealthy ancient Egyptian scribe Nebamun (the real thing is on show at the British Museum), from the banks of the Nile?

    Authoritative as it ought to be – Riley is a leading food writer and historian – this is a book about the mystery as much as the certainties of art’s centuries-old relationship with food.

    With her guidance we discover what’s missing from our collective knowledge and the question marks over the meaning of the preparation, preservation and consumption of food in an array of artworks.

    Few would be better placed than Riley to fill in the gaps using her expansive imagination.

    Riley answers questions I never knew I had about the great larder of art history; such as why the men of ancient Mesopotamia drank their beer with a straw, or why the Renaissance botanist Ulisse Aldrovandi commissioned a portrait of his pet monkey clutching an artichoke.

    And there are lessons aplenty to be learned, starting with the wisdom of Paleolithic cave painters; hunters for whom meat was never blindly taken for granted, but the subject of awe and intricate study in a time when “animals ruled the earth, and man was a puny creature”.

    Food in Art 2 620
    The Emperor Rudolph II, c.1590, Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Courtesy of Skoklosters Slott, Stockholm

    Riley’s sixth book examines the countless layers of symbolism in the many meals of art history, as depicted in all forms from ancient wall paintings, fine art, mosaics, and frescoes to illuminated manuscripts and stained glass.

    For those familiar with the author’s food columns in the Hackney Citizen, documenting intrepid culinary adventures in her Stoke Newington kitchen, expect the same hunger-inducing, poetic prose, and even more to learn here.

    It’s a handy volume for those of us who need a narrow lens with which to recall forgotten history lessons, organised into snippets that can be dipped in and out of with ease.

    Perhaps unwittingly, Riley’s descriptions of the micro-breweries of Mesopotamia offer much-needed perspective on contemporary foodie culture, reminding us that making your own beer is neither a laughable hipster fad nor a unique cultural advancement of our generation – it’s just something humans have done for thousands of years.

    And as for the humble cabbage, its varied role as artistic muse deserves a chapter all of its own, as we discover its long lost identity as a celebrated preventer of hangovers. And, then, ridiculously, as temporary placeholders for the heads of the sick in 15th century psychological experiments – not to be tried at home.

    Filtered through Riley’s irreverent, witty and ever-imaginative style, Food in Art is a guide through the sprawling past of art’s many interpretations of food, from the divine to the profound, and crucially the dark, humorous and absurd.

    From the practicality of Ancient Egyptian illustrated breadmaking techniques, to the strange vanity of Roman mosaic floors designed to look covered in the remnants of a lavish banquet, mice and all, Food in Art calls for some self-reflection.

    It’s a good opportunity to take a good long look at our ‘selfies with Spiralizer’, or the meaning behind Instagrammed kale salads of the 21st century. Rewriting Riley’s book in a thousand years’ time, what will the food historians make of us?

    Surely, as ever, we’ll be seen as we are; very vain, a bit clever and somewhat ridiculous.

    Food in Art: From Prehistory to the Renaissance is published by Reaktion Books. RRP: £30. ISBN: 9781780233628

  • Stratford group Assemble is first collective to receive Turner Prize nomination

    Greenhouse view: Granby Four Streets by Assemble. Photograph: Assemble
    Greenhouse view: Granby Four Streets by Assemble. Photograph: Assemble

    East London-based collective Assemble has become the first architecture and design studio to be shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize.

    Assemble, a group of 18 architects and designers based in Stratford, has been nominated for the prize for a series of projects that engage with the public sphere.

    These include the Granby Four Streets project, in which the group collaborated with local residents to transform a group of neglected terraced houses in Toxteth, Liverpool, refurbishing and painting empty them as well as establishing a monthly market.

    “In an age when anything can be art, why not have a housing estate?” said Alistair Hudson, director of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art and a Turner Prize judge.

    The group’s objective is to “address the typical disconnection between the public and the process by which places are made,” with their projects providing a stark contrast to “homogenous urban landscape which unfolds under processes such as design-and-build, and post-recession strategies of regeneration and gentrification”.

    Assemble started working together in 2010, with previous projects including Blackhorse Studios in Walthamstow, where the public can learn and practise manual skills, and 2011’s Folly for a Flyover, a public art space in Hackney Wick situated underneath the A12.

    Assemble is the first collective to be put forward for the Turner Prize in its 31-year history.

    The group will be up against artists Bonnie Camplin, Janice Kerbel and Nicole Wermers for the £25,000 prize, which is awarded annually by Tate gallery to a British artist under 50.

    The winner of this year’s Turner Prize is to be announced at a ceremony in Glasgow at arts venue Tramway on 7 December.

  • Hackney WickED art festival is cancelled

    Hackney Wicked 620
    Cancelled: Hackney WickED. Photograph: eatingeast via flickr

    Art festival Hackney WickED has announced it will not be going ahead this year due to “ever-increasing” production costs.

    The annual festival, which has been running since 2008, is taking the year off to “re-evaluate and adapt to the changing nature of Hackney Wick”, and will instead be curating a programme of smaller events.

    In a statement, the festival organisers said: “The festival faces ever-increasing production costs that are necessary to manage the event in line with requests from authorities and our own desire to present a safe, professional event.

    “Thousands of pounds have previously been spent on waste disposal, security, street cleaning and the general infrastructure required to manage the 30,000 plus crowds that attend the festival each year.

    “Hackney WickED greatly appreciates the sponsorship and funding received to date. However, the festival still has to rely heavily on in-kind support from suppliers, the management team and a volunteer network – and this is no longer sustainable for an event of this scale.”

    Anna Maloney, one of Hackney WickED’s six directors, told the East End Review earlier this year that “for Hackney Wicked and other local organisations the police and council have made it quite difficult for us to put things on.

    “[This] has actually created the expense because they made us responsible for the security of the whole of Hackney Wick and Fish Island.”

    All is not lost, however, as Hackney WickED now aims to evolve as an organisation by supporting local artists and creating more art events across London and beyond.

    It has also been awarded Arts Council funding to conduct research to measure the value of Hackney WickED to the wider community, which will help map out the way forward.

    Hackney WickED was formed by artists living in Hackney Wick as a “defiant uprising” in the face of the London Olympics.

    Since 2008, it has promoted creativity in Hackney Wick and provided a platform for local artists to showcase their work.

  • East London Painting Prize shortlist announced

    OMG I Love You by East London Painting Prize fainlist Marie Jacotey-Voyatzis
    OMG I Love You by East London Painting Prize fainlist Marie Jacotey-Voyatzis

    A shortlist of 23 artists has been announced for this year’s East London Painting Prize.

    Work by the artists is to go on show at Bow Arts Trust’s new artists’ studios The Rum Factory, a Grade II-listed former rum warehouse in Wapping that used to be part of News International’s printworks.

    The prize winner will announced on 13 May, and will receive £10,000 in cash and a solo exhibition at the Nunnery Gallery in Bow.

    The East London Painting Prize, now in its second year, celebrates the diversity and talent of artists who live or work in East London and is run by Bow Arts Trust and The Legacy List.

    Last year’s winner was Nathan Eastwood, whose winning painting, Nico’s Café, was an Edward Hopper-inspired image of an elderly man eating alone in a greasy spoon café.

    One of the judges Lizzie Neilson, Director of Zabludowicz Collection which supports the prize, said: “We had to be hard-nosed to get to this succinct group but I think there is a strength is showing the best of the best. Seeing these excellent paintings in the flesh was a fantastic experience and left me invigorated, as the breadth of painting practice in the East End of London is just staggering.”

    Rosamond Murdoch, Director of Bow Arts Trust’s Nunnery Gallery, added: “East London is a hotbed of talent and the painters shortlisted for this year’s prize are a distillation of that quality.”

    The shortlisted artists are:

    Hackney

    Michael Ajerman, Steven Allan, David Caines, Anna Freeman Bentley, Andrew Hladky, Kate Lyddon, Cathy Lomax, Lee Maelzer, Judith Rooze, Mimei Thompson

    Newham

    Peter Donaldson, Marie Jacotey-Voyatzis

    Redbridge

    Luke Rudolf

    Tower Hamlets

    Hannah Brown, Cyrus Shroff, Caroline Walker, Willem Weismann, Emily Wolfe, Vivien Zhang

    Waltham Forest

    Benjamin Doherty, Katrin Maeurich, David Ben White, Josephine Wood

  • INIVA Gallery evening courses begin with A Revisionist History of Art 1946-2015

    INIVA_gallery_620
    Iniva Gallery on Rivington Street in Shoreditch

    Iniva presents a short course that offers an introduction to international art history from 1945-2015 devised and taught by Dr. Juliet Steyn PhD. Using a chronological framework the five sessions map out the site of global art as a contested arena fraught with geographical, institutional and political tensions.

    The five sessions will explore issues of identity politics, the role of institutional frames and the commodification of the cultural sector in contemporary art. A number of artists and thinkers will be considered including: The New Vision Group Gallery, The Kitchen Sink School, John Berger, Stuart Hall, Donald Preziosi, Ingrid Pollard, Hans Haacke, Aubrey Williams, Fred Wilson, Carsten Höller and Francis Bacon.

    Course Price:
    £195 per person (15% Student Discount Available)
    Price includes all 5 sessions, 7.5 hours tuition

    Course Tutors:

    Juliet Steyn PhD is a cultural historian. She is interested in the workings of cultural institutions and in the formation of the subject and identity. She has published widely on art and cultural criticism focusing on art, the politics of memory and identity.

    Juliet was awarded a PhD in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury (1993) and an MA in the History of European Art (modern period) Courtauld Institute, University of London. Until 2013 she was Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Cultural Policy and Management at City University, London, teaching modules on Currents of Criticism and Post-Colonial Agendas.

    One session will be taught by art critic and curator Stella Santacatterina. Stella has a specialist interest in the The New Vision Group which was founded by artist Denis Bowen to promote international artists and abstract art. Stella is a contributor to Third Text, Art Monthly, Portfolio and Flash Art.

    The first course will run 26 February, 5, 12, 19 and 26 March 2015 from 6 to 7.30 pm.

    Booking information:

    Jenny Starr
    Tel: +44 (0)207 749 1247
    Email: jstarr@iniva.org

  • Nurse from St Joseph’s Hospice scoops top photography award

    Is it her by Carolyne Barber
    Photography bug: Is She Local by Carolyne Barber

    A Hackney nurse has won an international photography award, fending off competition from more than 20,000 entries.

    Carolyne Barber, an Advancing Practice Nurse at St Joseph’s Hospice in Hackney, won the Best Newcomer Award in the New Shoots category of the International Garden Photographer of the Year Competition.

    Ms Barber, who has only been taking photographs for five years, scooped the prize for a picture called Is she Local, of two damselflies peering over a leaf in Lee Valley Park.

    She said: “I know a little bush where the damsel flies hang out and had to get up in the night in the dark when they are still cold, and wait for sunrise. The timing is really important because as soon as they’re warm they fly off.”

    Bringing the beauty of the natural world into the hospice, Ms Barber’s photographs are displayed on the walls inside St Joseph’s Hospice.

    Her winning picture has been published in the International Garden Photographer of the Year book, and is on display alongside other winning entries, at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew until 6 April, and will then tour different venues around the world.

    www.stjh.org.uk @StJoHospice

  • Mary Barnes: Boo-Bah – art review

    Mary Barnes. Courtesy of Dr. J Berke
    Mary Barnes. Courtesy of Dr J. Berke. Photograph: Ollie Harrop

    The Nunnery Gallery on Bow Road, hosting the first show of Mary Barnes’s artwork since the major 2010 retrospective at Space Studios, isn’t far from Kingsley Hall in Bromley-by-Bow, where Barnes spent 1965-1970 covering the walls with her paintings, using her own faeces and later grease crayons.

    Kingsley Hall was briefly home to anti-psychiatrist R.D. Laing’s Philadelphia Association, which sought to provide spaces where people suffering from mental illness could live without being treated as insane. Barnes admitted herself in 1965.

    Laing contended that madness, rather than being an illness, was a reasonable response to chaos and injustice in society, with ‘anti-psychiatry’ in its more extreme forms coming to glamorise insanity, the mentally ill seen as exceptionally perceptive. Art was encouraged, both as ‘treatment’ and as a way of communicating such perceptions.

    “My first paintings were black breasts over the walls of the Hall,” wrote Barnes in 1969. “Joe gave me a tin of grease crayons. ‘Here, just scribble’. I did, on and on.” Joe – Joseph Berke, Barnes’s doctor at ‘the Hall’ – was also known to Barnes as ‘Boo-Bah’; the Nunnery show is named in his honour.

    Untitled by Mary Barnes, image courtesy Dr. J Berke, photo by Ollie Harrop
    Untitled by Mary Barnes. Image courtesy Dr J. Berke. Photograph: Ollie Harrop

    Barnes made and exhibited paintings until her death in 2001. Perhaps surprisingly, the Boo-Bah paintings are disciplined and composed. Small Figure, an early work, is made up of hurried, smudgy lines, but they are deployed deftly to reveal a little girl whose hunched awkwardness is expressive, moving and characterful, not clumsy.

    The row of colourful Untitled’s on the opposite wall bear similarly visible artefacts of their creation but their connected flow and intricacy of pattern have all it takes to trap a viewer’s stare.

    Barnes’s later works, done in oil pastels, have more solid blocks of colour and more figuration. They feature vividly drawn personages whose psychedelic colouring adds to their mystery, as though they were figures from an unknown religion.

    Small Figure by Mary Barnes. Image courtesy of Dr. J Berke, photograph: Ollie Harrop
    Small Figure by Mary Barnes. Image courtesy of Dr. J Berke, photograph: Ollie Harrop

    The exhibition is informative about the institutional origins of Barnes’s career and raises questions about untutored art, and art used as therapy. Do you look at Barnes’s paintings as symptoms of her illness or as one would a standard art-show? In this respect, some of anti-psychiatry’s eliding of distinctions is refreshing and brings clarity.

    ‘Outsider art’ – graffiti, ghost bikes, Christmas lights – is often more interesting and informative about contemporary culture than gallery shows. To see a suggestive blending of the one with the other, get thee to the Nunnery.

    A discussion of Barnes’s work, including Dr Joseph Berke on the panel, will be held at the Nunnery Gallery on 24 February.

    Mary Barnes: Boo-Bah is at Nunnery Gallery, 181 Bow Road, E3 2SJ until 29 March
    www.bowarts.org/nunnery

    Volcanic Eruption by Mary Barnes, image courtesy of Dr. J Berke, photo by Ollie Harrop
    Volcanic Eruption by Mary Barnes. Image courtesy of Dr J. Berke. Photograph: Ollie Harrop