'A Minor Place' by Hugh Marwood

 

'Vestige 8', Hugh Marwood, 

Acrylics, Paper Collage, Ink, Spray Enamel, French Polish, Misc. Solvents& Decorator's Caulk on Panel, 60 cm X 60 cm, 2016

I'd like to share the text that artist Hugh Marwood has written to accompany the exhibition, 'A Minor Place' at Artists Workhouse, Studley...

A Minor Place

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Wandering and wondering in a minor place.   Bathed in the sick glow of industrial light and irradiated sky.  Be-totemed with blank Cadmium.  The high-tension hum within the skull, where purpose falters - adrift in the amnesiac zones.

Night falls in through particulate dusk, and the ticking intervals of cooling diesels.  Looming tractor-units corralled in galvanized stockades.  The petro-dollar trail of oiled tarmac and the iridescent film on a sluggish canal.  An economy falters.  Cargoes at statutory rest - just in time.

An ice field of clustered cabs.  Blue TV flicker through a screen of filth.  The camera, winking red with each passing.  The parasite whine of servo motors - high above the city’s distant quake.  Remotely monitored, Auto-land.

 

'Artic Landscape', Shaun Morris, oil on canvas, 200x150cms, 2015-16

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And on - drifting, disembodied amidst dirty render and cataract panes, in an endless Now of abandoned occupancy.  The scraped palimpsest and wiped window.  Vestigial frames and the petrified squiggle of redundant mastic.  Searching for anagrams amongst scattered shards of signage.  Take no notice – the passage is redacted.  Your name erased – wiped in solvent.  Listen for the echo of lost voices – dying away in haunted spaces.

 'Wiped Windows 15, Hugh Marwood, photograph

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Nothing left now, but the assemblage of new fictions.  Erect a pin-board of forgotten dreams.  Memos of abuse on adhesive notelets.  Navigate with new, bogus mythologies – rejecting useless maps of uncharted territories.

Salvage these halftone tatters and discarded communiqués.  Compose a fitting memorial.  Only collage serves now – if new clues are to emerge.  Gather the lost, plastic cattle, herding them indoors, and into pastures new.

 'What Makes You Act So Cruely and Violently Toward The Children?'Andrew Smith, collage and acrylic on canvas 

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There is abundant birdlife beneath the interchange.  And a warehouse of meaning out there, somewhere - on a permanently illumined trading estate.  It hums softly, in the shadow of the motorway, at 3 am.

Hugh Marwood, 2016

 

The exhibition opens on Saturday morning 3rd September. Hope to see some of you there....

 

Danger In Darkness

I didn’t enter the studio at all in January, and have unusually not wanted to either. It tells me that I have needed to take a break after putting up my show in Nuneaton, and the stress of the last few months working towards it.  Trying to juggle my family life, my studio work, and my job at the same time can all prove to be a bit much, especially during these dark winter months and the mania that is Christmas.  I’m enjoying not doing anything, but there have a few things that have got me thinking about where I might take my painting work next.

I went into the studio one evening last week and cleared all my walls of the Scandinavian studies I made last year and on my trip in 2012. I carefully piled them in my plan chest, enjoying exposing the bare walls and returning to a ‘blank’ space again. I’m left thinking that the burst of activity I had early last year making all these pieces in about a month was the ‘art’ I needed to make from my experience there, and that’s enough. I’m aiming to go to Sweden and Denmark again later this year to visit my artist friend Jamie again, and we’ll see what happens then.  He has a large studio in rural Sweden that I hope to work from. 

I had an interesting conversation down the pub with my artist friend, Andrew Smith recently, where we discussed the whole ‘edgelands’ thing and the danger of ‘aestheticizing’ these sites and places through art, writing, photography etc. It is worth remembering that much of this landscape has been created in the wake of deindustrialization, the global economy, and the destructive policies of the right, notably Margaret Thatcher and her government, on huge swathes of different working class communities, largely in the Midlands and the North of England.  Many of these communities and towns have never recovered, but adapted to the rise of the consumer and service driven industries which have transformed the character and individual identities of our towns and cities, so that everywhere now looks the same. I would not like my own paintings to ‘aestheticize’ these places, and have hoped that my more recent paintings of the canal underneath the motorway present some ideas about this experience and the legacy of such policies and vicissitudes on the present-day Black Country. 

I was very pleased therefore, to read a terrific piece written by Leicester based artist and friend, Hugh Marwood, about ‘Black Highway’ on his blog. In it, Hugh discusses my recent paintings in great detail, asking at one point:

‘Could this erosion of descriptive detail, and consequent blurring of specific identity, echo the transformations that have overtaken this whole region?  Does this reduction of a subject towards formal concerns, recall the plight of a community once rooted in proud tradition but now shifted towards increasing disconnectedness and anonymity?’

It was interesting to read Hugh’s reading of the paintings in those terms, as so much of what he says here echoes my thoughts and feelings about the present day Black Country landscape, and how much it has physically transformed from when I was a boy. I lived for ten years away from it between 1990-1999, and when I returned I didn’t recognize it, so great was some of the transformations it had undertaken, and I felt incredibly alienated from it.  These changes were by no means exclusive to this region however; you see them wherever you look in the post-industrial, global landscape of England’s edgelands. Of course, these feelings have informed my paintings and their formal language. It’s great having someone like Hugh recognize it and discuss these issues in relation to my work. Thanks, Hugh. Here’s a link to the rest of his piece:

http://hughmarwood.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/shaun-morris-black-highway-at-nuneaton.html

Concrete Reflections...

i-Pad study

I found myself down underneath Spaghetti Junction again today. I was on a field trip with the students to gather research material for an urban landscape project. I made this interesting I-Pad painting, fascinated by the reflections under the really wide bridge that passes over the canal underneath. It was a cold but sunny day, and I really like the upside-down trees and the dark concrete column reflected in the water. 

I also like the reflection made by the underneath of the bridge in the water too, as seen in this photograph in the middle. It looks eerily like a ship is sunken and lurking deep beneath the depths. It is  very disorientating when viewed from the canalside. After a while you get lost and unsure what you are looking at; what is near and what is far; what is real and what is reflected. It really draws you in. This other image with the ‘window’ reflected from above has a similar strange and unsettling depth to it. I’d like to explore these reflections further. There is a similar spot near Smethwick I frequently pass in the car, craning my neck for a better view and nearly bouncing off the kerbside as I do. I need to park up and have a closer look. 

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I also enjoyed looking at the graffiti that is in abundance under the bridge too. There are layers and layers of it in places. These would really appeal to artist Hugh Marwood, who I exhibited with at The Works Gallery (It's nice to think that when I see things like this I'm now thinking of Hugh's paintings). 

Many people I spoke to at the exhibition seemed to be presume that my recent motorway paintings were based here, but they weren’t. They were developed from a location just outside West Bromwich under the M5. I am thinking that it would be great to explore the more complex dynamic structures of Spaghetti Junction though, but returning at night and seeing what it is like with the sodium light from the motorway against the concrete and the night sky. English teacher's I've spoken to recently, tell me I need to read Ballard's 'Concrete Island' too....

We Carry On...

It’s December already. What happened there? The exhibition came down just over a week ago now. I was hoping to post something more about it but unfortunately I just haven’t had the time. It was a good experience and I was glad to be a part of it, and alongside some really talented artists. As many of these artists are friends, it seems wrong to critique any of their work in this context, but there was a great deal of things I really enjoyed exploring in greater depth during the days I invigilated the show. 

H R Smoke, 'Important Words Obscured by Smoke', acrylic on canvas

Chris Cowdrill, 'Fence', digital print

Craig Underhill, 'Oak', ceramic

Hugh Marwood, 'Shut 1', mixed media on panel

Andrew Smith, 'Tower', acrylic paint on photo on canvas

The only real problem was the venue, which, despite it being a great space, proved even more limited (and much more expensive) than we first imagined when it was booked. The industrial building which houses The Works Gallery is occupied by many artists, and I discussed many of these issues with one of the studio holders one afternoon when they came in. They frequently use it for exhibitions, and they shared a similar sense of frustration. Another visitor also asked if we were going to do more events there, but as we packed up on the Friday afternoon, Chris, Andy and myself all agreed we were not.

There seems to be a real paucity of venues for hire to support artists like this in Birmingham. It’s a shame because there is a real wealth of talent in the area that is not associated with Digbeth’s eastside, or at the other end of the spectrum, the RBSA. There is a more fertile middle ground of intelligent, challenging and skilful artistic practice that often goes overlooked. Artists like Barbara Walker, Graham Chorlton, and Paul Newman spring to mind.

 It was also good to see my own work on the gallery walls and out of the studio, which often can be as much an excuse to organise an exhibition as any. It is strange seeing the three above together at last. They are to be seen as a triptych, placing the viewer in various positions in relation to the enveloping dark space, so displaying them like this for the first time was exciting. I’m still particularly keen on the one on the left as I think it is the best one, but after a couple of false starts with other paintings that I have now scrapped, this piece was the first one I was happy with and kickstarted the direction of the others to this point. This is bookended by the most recent one (below) which I think is also very strong. It seems to bring together all the concerns with trying to balance the formal concerns with trying to create a strong sense of place, the abstract with the representational, and a dynamic interplay between the colour and the light within the image (if I say so myself!). It was also painted very quickly and has a fluency in the execution that I can see now was perhaps ‘rehearsed’ across the preceding paintings. I’m now looking forward to exhibiting the wider series in Rugby in February 2013.

'Licence and Registration, oil on canvas

The question that currently preoccupies me though is, “what next?”

And yes, the titles were hastily arrived at by shamelessly looking through all the Bruce Springsteen songs and lyrics written about driving cars (which is obviously quite a lot!), and pilfering lines that seemed to fit.