'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....

 

'What Am I Doing Hangin' Round?

We worked hard last night to install ‘A Minor Place’ at The Artists Workhouse Gallery in Studley. When I say ‘we’, I mean myself and my fellow artist friends Andrew Smith and Hugh Marwood, with Hugh travelling down from Leicester.

None worked harder though than the gallery director, Dawn Harris and her partner Martin, who patiently and without complaint to physically hang each piece, giving us invaluable advice and guidance.

Due to our respective work commitments, we couldn’t start till in the evening at six, working through until 10.30. A celebratory pint at one of Studley’s seventeen pubs(!) later was incredibly welcome later.

 

I think the show looks really good. I’m incredibly impressed by Andy and Hugh’s respective paintings and other artworks, and felt a bit wobbly about my own work in comparison. It felt rather unsophisticated and clumsy. A bit like me. It will be interesting to see how it is received on Saturday evening’s Private View…

 

 

'We Had Stayed Up All Night'

 

'King of The Road', oil on canvas, 2015 

Ahead of ‘A Minor Place’ opening next Saturday on September 3^rd, here is a piece of writing by artist Andrew Smith. It will feature in a new publication by Indigo Octagon designed and created by artist Chris Cowdrill that will be for available for sale at the exhibition.

Andrew’s piece is a response to my lorry paintings, and is an adaptation of ‘The Futurist Manifesto’ by Italian artist Marinetti, written in 1908 as a ‘celebration of speed, machinery, violence, youth and industry’, in which Andrew has combined lots of phrases and language associated with trucks and the trucking life on the road. It’s a typically highly imaginative and surprising response from Andrew. I love it: 

'The Road', oil on canvas, 2015

‘We had stayed up all night’

We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, one with dispatcher brains, the other deadhead with tow chain of filigreed brass.  Sometimes we were driving by braille, at other times eyeballing the colouring book.  For hours we put the hammer down on the big slab, up to the last confines of total logistics control and blackening many a blue eagle with our super single tyres.

An immense pride was buoying us up, because we felt alone in those hours, like proud old gears, or forward knight squires against an army of hostile pole cats glaring at us from galaxy 949.  Alone like suicide jockeys feeding on motion lotion at the pickle park, alone with the training swifts who grope in the red-hot bellies of the freight shakers launched down their crazy courses, alone with the high speed chicken feeders reeling like wounded birds into the disco lights.

Suddenly we jumped, hearing the squawk box, and the huge off roaders that rumbled by ablaze with confusion lights, like massholes on holiday suddenly struck and uprooted by the flooding performance cummins.

Then the silence deepened.  But as we listened to the blue radio tooth muttering its feeble rambo, and the creaking rocking chair, we suddenly heard the famished roar of the nada trucks.

“Let’s go!” I said. “Friends, away! Let’s go! The polar bear and the better half are defeated at last.  We’re about to see the birth of the Pumpkin … we must smash the gates of life, brush our hair and comb our teeth.  Let’s go! Look there, on the earth, the very first dawn!  There’s nothing to match the splendour of the salad bar after winter, the ball bearing turbo slashing through the millennial gloom!”

We went up to our three snorting beasts, to lay amorous hands on their torrid breasts.  I stretched out my covered waggon like a corpse, but revived at the wheel, felt the hammer threaten my stomach.

High speed chicken feed swept us out of ourselves, blew our doors off, drove us through the clean shots.  And like young lions we raced after Death, the meat wagon: to be greasy side up, and back in the yard.  Death, domesticated, met us at every turn, holding out its paw like a city kitty. “Let’s break out of the swindle sheets, the chicken coop of safety, shake the bushes like the wind.  Let’s give ourselves utterly to the Unknown, not in desperation or at 10-33 or on cheap cb, but as comedians starting a new career at Paschall Services.”

Andrew Smith and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

 'The Tyres Rushing By In The Rain', oil on canvas, 2015