I dread a sunny day so I'll meet you at the cemetery gates . . .
RECENT SOLO EXHIBITION
Dissenters' Gallery & Chapel June 30- July 12 Kensal Green Cemetery Ladbroke Grove London W10. Opening Times 11 am - 8 pm Private View: Thursday 1 July, 6 - 9 pm Directions: a short walk from Kensal Green (Bakerloo Line) or 18 bus route to the main cemetery entrance on Harrow road with a pleasant walk through the grounds to the Dissenters' Gallery or direct entrance on Ladbroke Grove (Hammersmith and City Line), served by buses 23, 52, 70, 295 or 316 to Sainsbury's. http://www.kensalgreen.co.uk/documents/KG _location.html Exhibition coincides with the Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery's Annual Open Day on 3 July with a variety of events and tours, details at: http://www.kensalgreen.co.uk/documents/KG_ lectures.html  Dissenters' ChapelAfter viewing a stream stream of spaces that evaded my vision I seized upon the Dissenters’ Gallery and Chapel in Kensal Green Cemetery one of the oldest places of rest in London with its intimate cavernous chapel and court-like aura inciting a moralistic questioning which is a central debate surrounding boxing. The entrance to the chapel with its towering majestic columns also connected the historical thread to the Greek origins of the gladiatorial agon, an atavistic rite of passage.
Joyce Carol Oates has an illuminating take on the tragic theatre of the boxing enclosure: ‘If the boxing ring is an altar it is not an altar of sacrifice solely but one of consecration and redemption sometimes’. [1] The name of the gallery is also rather apt as boxers are invariably viewed as dissenters in the sporting world and in society, echoing a aura of wayward youth. The rituals of boxing are parallel to the washing of the body, the embalming of the skin, the binding and the shroud, distant coordinates as a shadowy analogy. [1] Oates, Joyce Carol, 'On Boxing', The Ontario Review Inc, 1987. p112. | Contact Details
Email: efo666@hotmail.com 'The Sympathetic Nerve' encompassed a variety of media including painting, sculptures and video through to a site-specific installation with a series of material gestures focusing on the ritualistic aspects of boxing and the fetishistic qualities of the materials. The initial impetus for this body of work was triggered and fuelled by my ongoing training participation within a local amateur boxing gym embarked on a couple of years before the project conception. My motivations for entering this red-bricked, chapel-like vestibule of the ‘sweet science’ of bruising were a combination of keen curiosity in the art of boxing, nostalgic notions I had absorbed and a concerted effort on my part to get fit in a challenging and stimulating environment. Indeed ascending that archetypal dimly lit steep staircase for that initiation with both anticipation and trepidation, to the rhythmic thud of bags and a pungent acrid waft, my romanticised vision felt reassuringly affirmed. A poignant analogy described by George Plimpton thus: ‘The atmosphere brought to mind a fetid jungle twilight’.[1] [1] Plimpton, George Shadowbox, New York, Putnam, 1977, p38. As a visual artist I found the gym ‘workshop’ with its cellular circuit honing areas and ritualised drills both aesthetically and conceptually a fascinating environment so deeply encoded with its own internal logic that I decided to embark on a project which would hopefully address some of the subtle idiosyncrasies of the sport. Equally engaging were the multitude of characters of all shapes and sizes both male and female who inhabited this densely closeted space. It seemed an interesting progression from a previous project explored, revolving around a traditional shoe factory in Northamptonshire, the hub of the industry, where I produced a series of projections and paintings focussing on the looped hypnotic movements of the workers, invoking many analogies with the boxing theme- the repetition and control of ritualised action, the cordoning of space and the imposition of ‘clocked time’, the Queensbury rules enforcing standardised periods of work and rest. The boxers are indeed moulded within this factoryesque production area with associations of input and output. I therefore deduced parallels could be drawn between the production area of the boxer and that of myself as an artist- ‘gym/studio’ and the public site of display/ spectacle- ring/gallery. The project title ‘The Sympathetic Nerve’ relates to the ‘fight or flight’ regulatory system governed by the solar plexus, which is in fact a point of weakness or vulnerability for the boxer (a knockout hit). The definition, encapsulates my interest in the sensory impulses and the human core/condition and the deep sense of emphatic expression and pathos felt for the sport. As the eloquent female writer on boxing Joyce Carol Oates notes: ‘the boxer…must learn to exert his “will” over his merely human and animal impulses, not only to flee pain but to flee the unknown’.[2] So perhaps as Joyce suggests it is more ‘fight and flight’, and it is this very conflict that I wished to explore. [1] Plimpton, George Shadowbox, New York, Putnam, 1977, p38. [2] Oates, Joyce Carol ‘On Boxing’, The Ontario Review Inc, 1987, p13. |
