Review of Laura Knight: A Working Life at the Royal Academy of Arts, London

30/10/19

Laura Knight: A Working Life

Royal Academy of Arts, London

2 September 2019 – 2 February 2020

Despite popular belief, Laura Knight (1877-1970) was not, in 1927, the first woman to be elected to the Royal Academy of Arts, London (as an Associate Royal Academician) since the founder members, Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser (selected, however, by the King, not elected by fellow members). Five years previously, Annie Swynnerton had received the same honour at the age of 78. Nevertheless, Knight’s election was something of a coup. It went on to take a further nine years for her to become a full member, and 30 more on top of that before she was invited to the institution’s annual dinner. Such were some of the myriad obstacles in the way of female artists at the time – but more on that to come!

Knight (at this stage still Laura Johnson) began submitting (always rather large) paintings to the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition in 1895, but was not successful until 1903, the year that she and Harold Knight married. They had met at Nottingham School of Art, where she had enrolled at the age of just 13, having been encouraged by her mother to become an artist. A portrait he painted of her a year later, in 1891, is included in this one-room exhibition, showing her in profile. Knight recalled how it was during the sittings for this painting that she “first got a hint that I meant as much to him as him to me”. 

Luckily for her career, Knight was a self-acknowledged extrovert, who promoted her work wherever and however she could. She featured, for example, in a British Pathé newsreel, sketching and painting models in a mock studio, and she further published two autobiographies: Oil Paint and Grease Paint (in February 1936, the month she was elected to full membership of the RA, and which became an immediate bestseller) and The Magic of a Line (in 1965, the year of her retrospective exhibition at the Royal Academy – the institution’s first one-woman show). Certainly, she exhibited widely, initially together with her husband Harold, and she also showed work at the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour, the Women’s International Art Club, the Venice Biennale (1914 and 1924), and with the Society of Women Artists, of which she became president in 1932. As early as 1929, she was made a Dame of the British Empire in recognition of her services to art.

Read the full review here

Interview with Madeleine Kennedy

12/10/19
Interview with Madeleine Kennedy
The Enchanted Interior
Laing Art Gallery
12 October 2019 - 23 February 2020

Published in the autumn 2019 issue of Art Quarterly

Interview with Katrina Brown

12/10/19

 Interview with Katrina Brown

Published in the autumn 2019 issue of Art Quarterly

Q: Morehshin Allahyari

12/10/19

Q: Morehshin Allahyari

Published in the autumn 2019 issue of Art Quarterly

Book Review: Bacon and the Mind: Art, Neuroscience and Psychology

12/10/19
Book Review: Bacon and the Mind: Art, Neuroscience and Psychology

Published in the autumn 2019 issue of Art Quarterly

Meet the Collectors: Ellen Sharples

12/10/19
Meet the Collectors: Ellen Sharples

Published in the autumn 2019 issue of Art Quarterly

Interview: Lucy Joyce

12/10/19

Interview: Lucy Joyce

Lucy Joyce: Electric Blue

E-WERK Luckenwalde

14 September 2019 - 28 March 2020

One of the two inaugural exhibitions at the former coal power station in Luckenwalde, a small town in the middle of the East German state of Brandenburg, is an expanded work, Electric Blue, by the British artist Lucy Joyce. It began as a flagpole commission (something the co-director Helen Turner – former senior curator at Cass Sculpture Foundation, near Chichester – would like to run annually), and grew to include an exhibition of drawings relating to the power station, the town, and their history, and a live “Aktion” on the opening day. The latter involved seven performers hoisting seven-foot mirrored arrows above their heads on the rooftops of the building, containers and parked vehicles, muttering the words: “Hope is not enough.” The seven performers represented seven Luckenwalde inhabitants Joyce had worked with in a research capacity during her residency in the run up to E-Werk’s opening. These ranged from Herr Schmidl, a former senior employee of the power station, to Turner herself. Miniature 3D-printed figurines of these seven characters also stand above the door to the gallery in which Joyce’s work is displayed. They will, she hopes, remain displayed somewhere in the new arts centre, long beyond the period of her residency and exhibition – a reminder of all those who made the project possible.

Joyce’s work is always multilayered, typically creating an interface between passersby and the cultural institution, or inviting people who are unfamiliar with contemporary art to discover points of access. For Turner, therefore, Joyce was the natural choice, because, as she explains: “I was really resistant to making this an isolated contemporary institution. I didn’t want it to just have the Berlin art crowd coming here, or even the international crowd; I wanted it to be a place that the locals felt welcome to come to as well and I knew Lucy would produce a really sensitive, generous commission in this regard.” 

Studio International spoke to Joyce about her residency and project on the opening day of E-Werk – just ahead of her Aktion.

Read the full interview here

Mandy Payne: Out of Time

12/10/19

Mandy Payne: Out of Time

Huddersfield Art Gallery

5 October 2019 - 4 January 2020

‘What began as a utopian project to design new schools, libraries, hospitals, housing estates, city halls, using the most cutting-edge building techniques, was deemed to have failed; resulting in ugly, inhuman buildings, unfit for purpose,’ says arts writer Liz Hoggard at the start of an article entitled ‘Why we must learn to love brutalist architecture’[1]. Artist Mandy Payne needs no convincing. She has long been inspired by the urban landscape – in particular Brutalist architectural structures, modernism, social housing, and notions of utopia and dystopia. She seeks, in her work, to capture not just often-iconic buildings and estates before they disappear to make way for luxury housing, but also the traces that people leave behind, and the memories that the buildings absorb. ‘The Lamp of Memory’ is indeed one of Victorian art critic John Ruskin’s chapters in his architectural treatise Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), and the idea that buildings are receptacles for what has passed through them is common in contemporary social sciences as well, where reference is frequently made to ‘collective’ or ‘cultural’ memory. Unlike objects, buildings remain rooted where they are, but can simultaneously change their type, thus becoming a fascinating and unique representation of time.

Payne, whose observational paintings are highly process driven, and full of different marks, textures and patinas, works with materials that have a physical connection to the sites themselves. She casts her own concrete (possibly a hangover from her previous career as a dentist, during which she would work with dental plaster and stone, wax and metals) into small canvases, which she works on directly, using micro masking tapes and spray paint (to reference graffiti) to build up zones of flat colour and then oil paint to add layers of finer detail. Until recently, her works were constrained by their medium, being no larger than 30cm square, but. for a while now, she has been exploring making larger works, using lighter, glass-fibre reinforced concrete panels. Another recent innovation is the use of marble as the substrate to highlight the perceived social inequalities of building materials. Funding from Arts Council England has enabled Payne to explore multiple locations in the lead up to this exhibition.

From 2015-17, Payne held a part-time fellowship in Stone Lithography at Leicester Print Workshop (with grants from Arts Council England and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation). During this time she pushed her practice still further, and now, as can be seen in the gallery vitrines, often creates lithographs with the same narratives as her paintings, which she frequently prints on to Japanese paper and collages on to concrete. A process of rebuilding? Of retrieving and reconciling a memory? 

Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí spoke of people’s ‘hunger’ and ‘thirst’ for ‘concrete images’ and, although he wasn’t speaking in as literal terms as Payne’s practice, her works certainly meet that basic human need, providing documents of these dying concrete constructs, which modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe described as ‘by nature skeletal buildings […] buildings consisting of skin and bones’ – as important to us, then, in our collective memory, as our own ancestors. 

[1] Liz Hoggard, ‘Why we must learn to love brutalist architecture’, in The Telegraph, 28 January 2016 [telegraph.co.uk/art/artists/why-we-must-learn-to-love-brutalist-architecture/, accessed 07/08/19]

Image: Mandy Payne, Out of Time, 2019 © the artist 

The Role of Reinterpretation in Annie Zamero’s ‘Royal Revolutions’

12/10/19

The Role of Reinterpretation in Annie Zamero’s ‘Royal Revolutions’

‘Reinterpretation,’ writes the anthropologist John H Hamer, ‘[…] is the way in which people seek to relate and adapt their changing experiences by using the past as a marker for interpreting the present.’ Annie Zamero’s work is all about reinterpretation. It was described in the New Art Examiner as ‘follow[ing] the example of Picasso, amongst others, to make a radical reinterpretation of earlier iconic works’. Indeed, Zamero combines aspects of Old Master, Baroque and Rococo paintings with imagery of contemporary icons of power– royalty and politicians – typically portraying them as if viewed in a fairground mirror, distorted to the point of abstraction. Zamero creates caricatures – or political cartoons – but seeks to elevate them to the level of fine art, in part by adding this historical gravitas, but also by her clearly defined methodology – which involves far more than simply taking a likeness to the extreme by exaggerating prominent characteristics. ‘They’re not really cartoons – some of my studies are quite serious character studies,’ she told Jude Cowan Montague on Resonance FM.

Read the full essay here

Laura Jean Healey: The (Un)Holy Trinity

08/10/19

Laura Jean Healey: The (Un)Holy Trinity

Laura Jean Healey is an award-winning film-maker who uses the medium of film to explore the nature of the cinematic experience. Her particular focus is on the role and objectification of the female form on the screen. Her holographic film installation, The Siren (2012), shot underwater in slow-motion, won the Passion For Freedom Gold Film Award in 2014. She is currently working on a new project, The (Un)Holy Trinity, exploring the representation of three legendary ‘unnatural’ women: Lilith, Eve and Salome.

Can you summarise the concept behind your forthcoming work – a triptych of digital films, portraying Lilith, Eve and Salome, entitled The (Un)Holy Trinity? What do these three women represent, both in existing legend, and for you? 

Throughout history, these three women – taken directly from the Bible (Eve and Salome), or inspired by the inconstancies found within the book (Lilith) – have been vilified for their ‘unwomanly’ actions and used to serve as a warning as to how destructive female sexuality can be if left unchecked. 

According to Jewish law, Lilith was the first wife of Adam. She was made in the same manner as him and considered herself his equal. When he wanted her to lie beneath him, she refused to submit, enraging both Adam and God. In her frustration, she fled from paradise, and, in so doing, became a succubus (temptress of innocent men), breeder of evil spirits, and child-murdering monster of the night.

  

Eve, unlike Lilith, was not made as an equal to Adam. Even though both she and Adam ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, bringing about the Fall of Man, it was Eve alone who bore the ultimate responsibility and was punished with the pain of childbirth and being subjected to her husband’s will.

Salome was a young virgin, who danced for her uncle/step-father, in order to win the head of John the Baptist. In her desperation to possess him, she exerted a more dominant, ‘masculine’ sexuality and was punished for this ‘monstrous’ nature. 

I have always been fascinated by these women’s stories. It is these cautionary tales of the ‘unnatural woman’ that have been used to justify holding back women throughout history. Even today, women are often still inherently judged by these unfair and contradictory standards.

Read the full profile interview here

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