Blog Archives

Central St Martins (1990-93)

24/3/2014

This week I added three slideshows - all to do with being a painting student at Central St Martins School of Art at Charing Cross Road, London, for three years from 1990 to 1993.

1993 Final Year Show
1991/92 First and Second year
Visit on April 8th 2011 just before they closed it!

1993
Final Year Show / We Are All Good Drivers Here

My BA (Hons) Fine Art Painting group:

Iris Argyropoulou, Trudy Barber, Lucy Banaji, Rupert Burt, Finn Bush, Katia Cadman, Terence Castle, Hsaio-Tze Chang, Stephen Cornell, Sean Dawson, Howard Dyke, Bernard Elsmere, Larissa Lu Faroghi, Matthew Flintham, Tina Friday, Jade Gibson, Kevin Hendley, William Hicks, Jane Hinchliffe, Katrine Hjelde, Kirst Holbrow, Jonathan Kennedy, Kathy Kubicki, Theo Lambrianides, Assya Makkawi, Edward McCarten, Sacha Meaden, Joanna Middlemass, Martine Moore, Michelle Murray, Brenda Noonan, Jane Porter, Clare Price, Anna Schroeder, Corinne Stevens, Emma Sullivan and Benjamin Winter

1991 / 1992 Student Years 1 & 2

Photos of my visit in April 2011 to St Martins just before the school moved out forever.

10 Comments

Poetry

14/3/2014

0 Comments

Exactly one year ago Pam Job and Judith Wolton from Poetry Wivenhoe were impressed by Mountains of the Mind, an exhibition of work at the Minories Gallery in Colchester by my then 2nd year BA (Hons) Fine Art students of the Art School at Colchester Institute.
The show was in response to the words of the landscape writer Robert Macfarlane.

Taking this idea of art created from text, Pam and Judith then approached us to collaborate with them on a poetry anthology based broadly on reflections on the theme of 'conflict'.

Amazingly, one year later all the students work has been included alongside the poems they responded to in So Too Have The Doves Gone, a new poetry anthology that was launched at The Minories last week on Friday 7 March as part of the Essex Book Festival.

The current exhibition at the Minories Gallery Unreasonable Behaviour Part 1 (The Manoeuvre) presents the student’s responses to a series of poems reflecting on the general theme of conflict and inspired by the Wilfred Owen Memorial at Ors in Northern France.

Ruta Grigaite 'Bitter Fruit'

Bitter Fruit

We live with fear
but hope leaps ahead
as a deer chased by a hound.

We follow the clouded star of hope
and now in the nowhere, claustrophobic expanse
of an East European airport
my older brother, myself, and his friend,
three bitter fruit brought down to earth,*
seeking the spring of liberty,*
test out the passports bought at the cost
of two years labour
in dream-filled poppy fields.

We must travel beneath the surface of life
like a frog who takes to the water
to evade the snake ǂ that prides itself
on its venomous power.
We must move without disturbing the sleep
of the coiled serpent whose tongue is forked and jaws are wide.
Our souls live in the silence of our breath. ǂ

Fear lays its cold fingered touch on our skins
as we ride on the buffers between bouncing trucks;
steadying ourselves, numb, clasping a cable
while a screaming night express streams past.
We have no light, just the constant glint of steel
swishing and jolting below our feet.
Darkness is the candle ǂ that lights our hope,
non-existence will guarantee our life.
Under tarpaulins on a lorry I cuddle fear close
to keep bottled the fizzing soda of despair
which wants to explode in gulping cries
for my buried mother.

We take our chance at the backs of market stalls
to find a fallen peach, a rolled apple, a coin.
At each border we stick together.
The greatest wealth of this world is the company of friends.*

At Calais we sneak on to the axle of a coach,
Hearts pumping but lighter than the feathers of a dove,
blind moles scrabbling our way to England.

No matter how fast you run
Your shadow more than keeps up.
Sometimes it’s in front. ǂ

When authority orders ‘come out!’, my brother goes first
then I squeeze myself between coach and tarmac.
Reflected in the wide window of the police station
I see passengers on the coach gawping, wondering,
and in the eyes of more than one woman there
the look of my mother when she found me in trouble.

I sink to the ground,
My dreams drained away
with my tears.

Peter Sandberg

*Borrowed from the 20th century Dari poet Ustad Khalilullah Khalili; Bitter fruit falling upon the earth
ǂ Borrowed from the 13th century Dari poet Jalaluddin Rumi; Enough words?
Both were born in what is now Afghanistan.

Sarah Lidster 'The Bends'

The Bends

In the safety of a dining room in Kent
The glittering eyes of the Frenchwoman
Hold us in Thrall; they dare us not to listen.

She is in a concentration camp in the last days of the war.
Lying in the bunk she shares with a woman who’s already dead,
she is aware something has changed.
No voices.
No sound at all.
The place bulges with silence.

Softly she slithers to the floor,
shuffles to the unlocked door.
Clutching at the wooden jamb,
she quails at liberty in sunlight.
Her bare soles marry with the grains of grit and dust,
begin to question what this union might mean;
her dead-dull eyes are not yet ready
to engage with those of others that she meets,
the final four of thousands who were brought here.

Songbirds let out of a snare,
The women cautiously explore their freedom.
The kitchen draws them in.
On the table, glistening red, lies a side of beef.
They tear at it with bare hands, eat it raw.

Diana Hirst

Judith Lunn 'Earth'

Earth

Dry. Cracked.
The soles of their feet. The soil.
Heat shimmers and dust clogs
The cups, bowl, pores and
Settles as black sleep in children’s eyes.
She dreams of water, soft silver mirrors
Reservoirs surrounded by grass where cattle grow fat.
And anger, tight, clenched is felt like thunder rising from
the distant purple hills.

Petra McQueen

Arlene Machin 'A Ballad of 2014'

A Ballad of 2014

Shut up about the first world war
Men are still dying and don’t know what for
We can’t seek to get the point somehow
Shut up about it – end it now

Shut up about that world war one
It’s obvious we’ve not moved on
The last living soldier said it’s ‘organised murder’
So why celebrate it any further?

And the pity’s really not enough
Unless you try to stop that stuff
Mechanical death’s an enterprise zone
Click a button, deploy a drone

The ruling class is still pretending
The trust they broke still won’t need mending
Faking being one of the boys
In their celebratory noise

Nostalgia for sorrow means that you
Have no real feelings that are true
Listen, hear the peacenik say
Goodbye ‘Goodbye, Dolly Gray’

Death and horror are bad – we get it
And if war still goes on , you let it
Mostly insulting, sometimes a bore
Shut up about the first world war

Adrian May

Abigail Ryman 'End of a Lesson'

'No End Of A Lesson' – from Part II

You have seen the photographs, of course –
All skulls and eyeballs, bodies like bundles of bones
Cackhandedly wrapped in skin?

No, you have not seen them.
You have seen pictures like them.
The Boers of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State

Could know nothing of Belsen or Ravensbrűck
Still to come, forty years down the road:
Only the designs of early British camp

Where mothers, wives, young children
In this and thirty others
Died off quickly in the heat at Christmas,

Or the freezing rains of the high veld in July –
Not forgetting, as we usually do, all the other camps
For the servants and labourers

Who were not white. They were dying too –
The invisibles in their thousands.
And what was it all for, this ‘regular sort of picnic’,

This final ‘gentleman’s war’, this ‘tea-time’ squabble
That became a bath of blood for the new century
To learn how to swim?

Gold, of course. Isn’t it always gold or
Diamonds of reserves of oil – whatever it takes
To bankroll a ravenous empire with the muzzles off?

Unless you want to say it’s competing gods,
Making us mad again and again,
In the same and different ways.

Rodney Pybus

Ruth Fosker 'The Paper - from The Tale of Miss Potter and the Mushrooms'

from The tale of Miss Potter and The Mushrooms

3. The Paper

Imagining what might have happened had Beatrix Potter been permitted to read her paper ‘On the Germination of the Spores of the Agaricineae’ at the Linnean Society.

You’re standing on a stage,
the hall reminding you of a field
after a summer downpour – scores
of pale bald heads are staring at you blankly.
Suddenly you feel
like the blue-coated hero of your tales –
you’ve been caught trespassing.
Somehow, your female form slipped through the doors
unseen, and now you’re trapped in a net of ignorance,
prejudice spreading through the room
like mould along a slice of bread. You clear your throat.

You give your lecture, wait for the applause:
someone coughs, the great clock ticks; silent mirth
hangs in the air, and dust motes dance like spores.

Alex Toms

Jane Badley 'Praxis'

Praxis

I have stood in the overgrown queues for bread.
I have waited in snow and ice and rain.
I have prayed for the dying and the dead.

I have ached for a son’s return in vain.
I have looked into the lifeless eyes
of the living, seen the strong insane.

I have heard – believed – too many lies.
A silence weaves each day and night,
ravels and knots our collective cries.

It begins with hunger, a bloodless fight,
The courage of mothers, daughters, wives,
The city domes and their dying light.
I have lost – I have lived – too many lives.

Karen Dennison

Sarah Grey 'Rain'

Rain

So gentle the rain beat down, as it does, it always has done,
not gentle rain that drops from heaven

but more a weapon, intimating deluge, spearing from
lead clouds in strikes that fall and penetrate

our raw, basic flesh. Our warm clothes are nothing.
This wind and rain dismiss such shields,

lifting our weak feet high, and bullying
us into walls. We become as useless as umbrellas.

I’d always stayed inside weather like this,
kept safe and dry until it pounded past like an army.

We are faced with our bare stupidity, our saturated skin.
I thought I had a place. We were stuck together.

Now we are just things hurled, a bit of me there,
A bit of you there, and we don’t know where we will land.

Joan Norlev Taylor

Kate Owen 'A Joinery'

A Joinery

Against a stubborn nail a stubborn hammer pounds,
crushing steel in angles where a straighter steel stood.
Blow on blow on strident blow, this persecution sounds
echoes of its violence forever in the wood.

Great noises end with silence, the hammer’s put away,
But what is bent by savagery can never be made good.
Though violence passes finally, this monument will stay:
a nail firmly planted here, forever in the wood.

Oliver King

Maria Medina Inglesias 'Landgirl's Song'

Landgirl’s song

for Dorothea Boggis Rolfe

I press my head into her flank.
She chomps and slobbers on cow-cake.
Milk-jets hiss and froth
into the pail.

Three days we had for our honeymoon.
On Tuesday the moon was full and we
were lifted on its arc,
its tidal pull.

Wednesday, breakfast. Rain in staves.
Too shy to meet the other’s eye,
our fingers touch by the tea cosy,
sweet peas in a jar.

On Thursday the sun broke through,
drawing steam from potato fields.
Hand in hand we strolled downstream
from Wormingford to Wissington

and lay in the graveyard by the church
where an ancient painted dragon lurks.
Knot-grass, hairbells,
clumsy bumble bees.

It’s dawn – the moon is full again.
The ache of his not being here. I’ve stripped
the cow, she saunters off. Blue silk
riffles the cooler’s ribs.

First the clink of empty churns
then a rumble within my breast.
Forty bombers thundering east,
heavy with their deadly load.

Brave boys those, so far from home!
But where is he? Tunisia, France?
As I shade my eyes and watch them go,
his child quickens for the very first time.

Anne Boileau

Sharon Rawlinson 'No Peace Without War'

No peace without war

Alone in bed with Hardy
far from the madding crowd
I sense before I see you lousing up
the symmetry of curlicues and loops
on meadowsweet- and tulip-papered walls.

O plain brown moth, you wall-creeper,
eye-sucker, ear-filler, solitude-killer,
rug-unraveller, biter of holes
in woollen clothes – how dare you flap
your raggedness inside my paraffin lamp?

Domestic pterodactyl, glass-chimney-clicker,
how can I stop you? I can stop watching you.
Pooff. I douse the flame, close my book
at Hardy’s profound ceiling of stars
and drift into a heaven under eyelids.

What makes you throw your horrid suicidal
body at the window? Clickety-thug
and thug again, you blasted hooligan,
some prehistoric memory of flame
must be knocking about in your insect brain.

My grandmother who rests in lucky peace
captured dozens of you with her bare fingers
insensitive to legs on skin or wings in throat
and dropped you in the woodstove. Hundreds of you.
I light the lamp, roll a Sunday supplement

into a weapon of moth destruction.
Ha-bloody-ha, you vermin, I’ll get you yet.
You’re stupid on the window, I calculate
a whack. Damn. You think you’re safe behind
the vine and flower curtain, not a chance.

You stumble to the tabletop, dumb loser.
I trap you under cosmopolitan prose.
Dead Moth, you bloodless little dope.
I smirk at your dust on the tablecloth,
nothing wet, merely a brush-away smudge.

Nancy Mattson

Jacqueline Bakowski 'How Things Are'

How Things Are

He is shouting at her in the street,
Shut your Quasimodo mouth,
bitch. She protests, he goes on,
Don’t twist and change things.
I’m telling you how things are.

This woman in denim and flowery shoes
just stares.

He empties her purse, counts the coins,
Goes off. She says to the ground,
why don’t you believe me?

I want her to go
before he comes back.
But here he comes, smiling,
swinging four cans of Strongbow.

Suzanne Conway

A big thank you to Jane Badley, Jacqueline Bakowski, Ruth Fosker, Sarah Gray, Ruta Grigaite, Maria Medina Inglesias, Sarah Lidster, Judith Lunn, Arlene Machin, Kate Owen, Sharon Rawlinson and Abigail Ryman for letting me include their lovely art work.
This project would not have happened without the generous support and enthusiasm of Jane Frederick, my best colleague.
Cheers to Pam Job and Judith Wolton and the poets for allowing me to share their twelve poems on this blog from the newly published anthology:
Job P, Wolton J (2014) so too have the doves gone, Jardine Press Ltd, Wivenhoe

Also see review of book and exhibition by Dave Martin at InSuffolk.

Exhibition runs until 22.03.2014
at The Minories Gallery in Colchester

0 Comments

Cill Rialaig

9/3/2014

4 Comments

This weeks' blog I would like to revisit and share the residency I did before RESIDE residency.

Exactly one year ago I was at Cill Rialaig in Ireland, a studio retreat for three weeks, located in the restored ruins of a pre-famine village, in a wild and remote landscape situated on the very edge of the Atlantic Ocean! I drove all the way from Ipswich to this 'very edge' and had the most wonderful time.

Each artist has their own cottage inclusive studio, there are seven of them, occupied by artists and writers, and an eighth cottage, Tigh an Comhrá (Gaelic for “house of conversation”) or Meeting House, a place for residents to meet or enjoy an unusual library. Currently Cill Rialaig is fund raising to build a musician's cottage.

The closest village, Ballinskelligs, is three miles away. This is in a Gaeltacht, a rare Irish-speaking area, and is one of the least populated areas in Europe. Ballinskelligs has a population of less than 600; it has one general store/petrol station, a post office, two pubs, and a few seasonal cafes (and the nearest place to access internet). The largest town, Cahersiveen is a 20 minute drive away, and here are grocery stores, a great French patisserie, a good fish shop, a brilliant hardware store, a newsagent, and of course several pubs.

Cill Rialaig is a quiet, remote retreat where one can temporarily renunciate ordinary domestic and work demands. The isolation offers the opportunity to focus entirely on one’s creative work without interruption.

I did a lot of walking, the light and landscape are amazing, always changing. What was really special to me: there is no organised entertainment or residency programming nor are you expected to produce anything in exchange.

As you can imagine the lifestyle is very simple and basic. No television, computers, microwaves & internet access.
I cooked my own meals, cleaned the cottage ...

This slide show is of 28 photos from the cottages and the environment.

I attach paintings by Leonara Neary who was at Cill Rialaig at the same time as me.
She was brilliant company for two weeks and I love her work!
Leonora, thanks for allowing me to share your paintings, much appreciated!

Series: Waters that pull

Waters that pull (1) acrylic on canvas, 40x40cm

Waters that pull (2) acrylic on canvas, 40x40cm

Waters that pull (3) acrylic on canvas, 40x40cm

Waters that pull (4) acrylic on canvas, 40x40cm

Leonora Neary - Artist statement

How we experience and view our surrounding landscape varies greatly and can be determined by a myriad of circumstances, personal and otherwise. To experience a particular place consistently, to know it through seasons, through years, through a substantial portion of a life, one cannot but absorb a sense of a place into ones being and memory. It is invariably a personal journey where the physical landscape forms the backdrop to a daily life, where a steady trickle of physical and emotional memories over time develops into a visual and mental file, a composite of imagery and experience; the personal documents and snapshots of a place and time.

http://leonoraneary.com

The following artists were also at Cill Rialaig in March 2013:

Janet MacFadyen, poet from Massachusetts, USA

Anne Payton, painter from Reading, England

Charlotte Kelly, painter from Galway, Ireland

Barbara Pecarich, Mystic therapist from New York

Cill Rialaig / information and contact details

http://writersweek.ie/news-from-writers-week/cill-rialaig-allowing-the-creative-spirit-to-rejuvenate-and-be-inspired

Website: http://cillrialaigartscentre.org/about/Facebook
Telephone: + 353 66 9479297
Email: cillrialaigarts@gmail.com

4 Comments

STUDIO THIS WEEK

2/3/2014

2 Comments

The 31 images attached have been taken of my studio this week on the very sunny Wednesday here in Ipswich.
It's been a good week, arriving every morning around 7.30am. Much needed! At times it felt I was back at college.
I work on two tables plus wall and floor space.
For the past three weeks two outside walls of my studio were also a little flooded with water from above, which meant I had to shift paintings and other stuff around.
The photos are not arty or in any special order.
The first 5 images are all postcard size. All works in progress.

Door decor

Bubble wrap curtain to keep the cold out.

Floor boards drying ...

This is where the rope for the church bell runs through in my studio.

One of four fly catchers.

Not much wall space this week due to the wet walls.

I love having this photo of Sandra Blow in my studio.

2 Comments

Author

CLAUDIA BÖSE, a painter based in Ipswich, Suffolk.

I construct my paintings through process, led by daily life, history and nature. I hope my ongoing engagement with light, colour and forms creates a new perception.

I am inspired and guided by the painterly process and its relation to abstraction; the way I handle paint invites an audience to consider my work without prejudice.
Decisions about when and how I use paint are also strongly guided by my empathy for work which has been created by other women painters.

I am drawn to regions which could be described as, geographical and psychological borderlands, especially those which have been interpreted throughout history by artists and writers.

Recently I began working in a new studio based high in the church tower of a modernist church in Ipswich; this is also adjacent to our allotment.
The very unusual perspective in tandem with attending to plants has already provided a different grounding and enrichment for my work.

Central St Martins (1990-93)

Poetry

Cill Rialaig

STUDIO THIS WEEK

Archives

Categories