Eco-art in Bristol

Posted on July 23, 2015 by Judy

I recently encountered a pair of whales in the centre of Bristol. Not in the harbour, where you might expect the occasional sighting of a cormorant, but in a fountain on Millennium Square.

Made from Somerset willow woven into the two immense marine mammals, it’s a truly imposing work, with 70,000 plastic bottles, collected at the Bath Half and Bristol 10k forming the swirling, glimmering ocean they swim through.

And yes, those are bottle tops hanging from its imposing tail.

It’s a really dramatic, beautiful way to draw attention to the 15 million bottles we send to landfill every day – apparently around eight million tonnes of plastic end up in oceans each year, equivalent to the body weight of 45,000 blue whales.

So the message is, avoid single use plastic, upcycle and, when you’re thirsty, think of the whales.

The artwork will be in situ until 1st September 2015, when, I presume, the whales will migrate to warmer waters. Find more details at www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-33548708 and www.bristol2015.co.uk/bristol-whales/

Lifework with Yurim Gough

Posted on June 18, 2015 by Judy

Who says drawings need to be done on paper or canvas? Korean artist Yurim Gough has found clay to be the perfect medium, much to her own surprise.

“It was always my dream to be an artist, but in my own country I never even touched clay,” says the former fashion designer, who moved to Bristol eight years ago in search of a new creative direction.

In fashion design Yurim experimented with a multitude of materials, but says it took five years of exploring “new mediums for my art, such as wood-carving, before I found that the feeling of clay told me that it was my thing to use. In fashion design I took great satisfaction from realising my imagination, and the attraction of clay is in being able to achieve that same satisfaction.”

Since early childhood, Yurim has “always been drawing. I was looking for a long time for what I could do that would make me the most happy, and since the drawing had always done this, and now the clay did too, it just happened that I brought these two things together.”

It was a visit to “a reclusive local pebble beach” that helped realisation dawn. “I was playing with the stones, drawing on them with a pencil for fun and making up stories.”

Yurim is entirely self-taught, developing her skills through “concentration and repetition. I went to lots of life drawing sessions on and off for a period of almost 20 years.”

To create the ceramic bowls and other objects that she likes to draw on, she explains, “I hand-mold the pieces, then they are bisque fired, then I draw in front of a live model with ceramic pencil.”

Following this, the artwork is glazed then fired. “I then apply gold lustre and fire again.”

Through combining her ceramics with her beloved drawing, Yurim says she had something of a breakthrough. “I have never rubbed anything out when life drawing, because there is not enough time,” she says. “One day I was drawing and made a mistake and in frustration, I crossed strong lines through the attempt. It made me feel so free, I suddenly realised that this was me, and carried on. I also found that drawing like this, I could focus in a way I had not been able to before.”

The result is a sketchy, vibrant style crammed with vitality. Her figures are gorgeous but imperfect, just as we are – in fact, their stunning beauty lies in their imperfections.

Being in front of a living, breathing model has an impact too.

“I love the human energy giving me craziness, sadness, happiness and other feelings – it is different every time.”

They fizz within their stillness, seemingly holding in emotions evident in their posture, and where their tensions lie, with Yurim’s lines emphasising this with powerful understatement.

The restrictions imposed by a life class drives her productivity, that, “and wanting see what the result will be. Living in my country, and working in fashion, I never had any time. Coming to Bristol things slowed down and I realised what I could do with limited time. In life drawing, you have a fixed time limit for the pose but you have to slow down and see what comes out.”

Find more of Yurim’s work at yurimgough.com and shop.theotherartfair.com/artists/yurim-gough.

Are you an artist or do you know an artist who would like to be showcased on SkyLightRain.com? Get in touch at judydarley (at) iCloud.com. I’m also happy to receive reviews of books, exhibitions, theatre and film. To submit or suggest a review, please send an email to judydarley (at) iCloud.com.

Colm Tóibín’s truth in fiction, and fiction in truth

Posted on May 26, 2015 by Judy

Colm Toibin © Brigitte Lacombe

I first discovered Colm Tóibín through his voice, listening to him read one of his stories on some literary podcast. Of course, I fell at once in love – that cadence, that accent paired with his humour and intellect! Who could resist?

He visited my home town last week, appearing at Watershed for Bristol’s Festival of Ideas, to talk about Nora Webster, a novel drawn from his own childhood experiences, yet told from the point of view of a woman loosely based on his mother.

This is not memoir – but it is deeply wound in with Colm’s own memories, and his desire to capture the feel of the time and place he grew up in as well as the feelings he witnessed his mother go through following the death of her father.

He’s an extraordinary man – as comfortable with an audience’s gaze as he is with the quiet he must seek out to actually write. He speaks with wry amusement and a seductive generosity. Even those he finds baffling he regards with interest rather than anything like scorn.

He is uncommonly candid about his thoughts on almost any matter, from his susceptibility to suggestions of places to visit, which he blames for the fact he’s lived and loved so many places, to his time as a journalist “causing trouble in Ireland” by gleefully asking GPs for prescriptions for condoms (“it’s a young man’s game”) to the referendum taking place in Ireland the day after his Bristol visit, which will decide whether the constitution should be amended to allow gay marriage.

He describes a novel as “a thousand details”, and it’s a trait I’ve noticed in his short fiction too – layering telling details gently around his characters so that the world they move through becomes real, and their thoughts and behaviour becomes real.

When asked why he wrote Nora Webster from the point of view of the mother rather than the young boy based on himself, he says it’s because he didn’t want to write “one of those sad Irish stories, where a sad boy walks home from school and looks at a puddle and thinks it looks sad…”

The excerpt he reads from the novel is actually very funny, relaying the moment when the grieving mother decides to get her hair dyed and instantly, even before she leaves the hairdresser’s, regrets it. He talks of this being his way of capturing the beginnings of change in a small Irish town during the 1960s. They may not have had the fashions or rock and roll, but “the way women dealt with their hair changed.”

The book took him 14 years to write, which he puts down to the fact that “Putting shape on things that actually happened is very difficult. Every year I would add something, put in another scene, then step away.”

One of these scenes sowed the seeds that would become his bestselling novel Brooklyn, soon to be released as a film, so those 14 years weren’t solely devoted to the mulling and dithering required for Nora Webster.

He speaks of the time after his father died, explaining how he and his brother were constantly watching and listening, trying to figure out “how things would be now.” It meant he soaked up a mass of moments which seemed unnaturally heightened, and which crop up throughout Nora Webster. As a result the book is shored up by truths that offer up the impression of real life unfolding on the page, though he does admit to one rather wonderful, entirely fictional, flourish. “I needed to lift her out of it,” he says of her despondency, “It couldn’t just carry on, page after page, so I got her to sing. And that never actually happened. I just needed it for the story.”

Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín is available to buy from Amazon.

Book review – How To Be Both by Ali Smith

Posted on April 28, 2015 by Judy

In Ali Smith’s novel How To Be Both, anything, it seems, is possible. Time shifts and slides, a girl enacts rituals to bring her dead mother back from the grave and a 15th century Italian painter springs back into being. On one level a story exploring grief, and the ways we seek to make sense of it, it hides a far larger tale within itself, split deftly into two halves.

In one segment, George, the afore-mentioned bereaved teenager, grapples with the fluidity of being both here and then as she recalls her mother with such intensity that time loses it boundaries. She pours over aspects of her mother’s beliefs, including her passion for equality and justice, to the extent that George feels compelled to watch underage porn in an effort to acknowledge the suffering of the girls being abused.

She also takes to repeatedly visiting a painting by Renaissance painter Francescho del Cossa, whose frescos resulted in George’s mother sweeping George and her brother off on an impromptu flit to Italy in the months before she died. Continue reading →

Poetry review – Of Love and Hope

Posted on April 21, 2015 by Judy

Fewer subjects seem to inspire more poetry than the thorny topic of love, so it takes a lot for one book of love poems to jump out from the pile. Of Love and Hope does it rather beautifully though, without shouting for attention, but simply by being spilling over with thoughtful, evocative words.

The fact that this poetry anthology is sold in aid of Breakthrough Breast Cancer and Breast Cancer Care certainly helps. Nothing assuages the guilt of paying out for yet another book (when your shelves are already packed with unread ones) like knowing the proceeds go to a good cause.

Plus you really are likely to read this one. Editor Deborah Gaye has brought together a carefully selected array of poems that twist, flip and sigh their way into your emotions.

The poets who contributed to the anthology are truly top-notch, counting among their number Seamus Heaney, Wendy Cope, Carol Ann Duffy, Victoria Wood, Arthur Smith, Sir Paul McCartney, Roger McGough, Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch and Margaret Atwood. An impressive guest-list! Continue reading →

Book review – No Other Darkness by Sarah Hilary

Posted on April 14, 2015 by Judy

If you’ve read Someone Else’s Skin, Sarah Hilary’s stunning debut, you’ll have high expectations of the second book in her Marnie Rome series.

Quite rightly so. What you might not be prepared for, even with the book’s title, is just how dark you’re expected to get.

Here’s a clue: it begins with a pit, in the ground, containing the bodies of two little boys abandoned five years before; a family fostering a shifty teenage boy; a weird neighbour who collects dolls, and that’s not even the half of it.

Hilary conjures up scenes with her usual verging-on-poetic adroitness, in which aromas have sounds – “The smell coming up was squeaky and high-pitched, like the wail Cole had let out” – and emotions reek – “Marnie could smell remorse leaching from the woman’s skin, a sweet-sour smell like a nursing mother’s.” Continue reading →

Visual impressions with Midge Naylor

Posted on April 9, 2015 by Judy

Selm Muir by Midge Naylor

Looking at Midge Naylor’s paintings, monoprints and photographs, I’m struck by a sense of Britain’s coastal landscapes, places of wildness, wind, rain and brief glorious moments of sunshine when the light catches on drenched edges and makes them suddenly sublime. Her work offers up shapes and shades that shortcut you to the feel of a place.

“Painting,” she says, “is my preferred medium and I use lots of different materials, reworking by removing or layering until it feels ‘right’. And then there’s colour… that’s why it’s the medium I use most often. The materiality of a painting seems to increase its imaginary potential and feeling of presence.”

The same impressions feed through to her monoprints, a process she came to almost by accident. “I started monoprinting when on an etching course a few years ago,” she explains. “Soon realising that the long process involved in etching didn’t suit the way I like to work, I used the equipment to produce monoprints. Most are really monotypes – I don’t use the plate for more than one print and there’s no going back – probably fewer than one in four is a success.”

Midge’s photographs are equally abstract, capturing details most of us would overlook. “The unexpected and the usually unnoticed attract me, together with fine textures, patterns and colour,” she says. “Editing of photographs is kept to an absolute minimum.”

The way Midge works is enticingly exploratory: “I think of the work as experimental – it refers to landscape but it’s a psychological landscape,” she says. “I’m a studio painter and I draw a lot, but don’t gather material for specific paintings from observational drawing outside. I have no idea what will happen when I start a work and the excitement is in making visual a kind of reverie. ‘Selm Muir’ (at the top of this post) is an example of this. It’s an ‘inscape’ created spontaneously, driven by memory and emotion.”

Many of her pieces don’t have titles or have non-specific ones “because I don’t really like putting ideas about subject matter into the mind of the viewer, particularly in the more abstract works.” It means we’re left to read into the pieces and make sense of them however we wish or are able to, creating an unspoken collusion between artist and audience.

Midge’s landscape piece March 15 #2 (it’s the second she drew on that date) is currently on show in the RWA’s Drawn exhibition. It’s already been sold, so take a look while you can!

A building of memories and ghosts

Posted on March 31, 2015 by Judy

Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery is currently host to a curiously diaphanous exhibit. Created by South Korean installation artist Do Ho Suh, it replicates the corridor of an apartment he once lived in, in New York, and is remarkably detailed, from delicately stitched light switches to ventilation grills and pipes.

The enticing staircase marked out in crimson is too delicate to climb, which means the city views from its rooftop can never be seen.

As people enter the corridor, the sheer fabric transforms them into ghosts of themselves – like a slow, thoughtful parade of Ho Suh’s remembered guests.

It’s playful (as the artist’s fairy daughter demonstrates so well), contemplative and transportative – the most cerebral aspects of a Wendy house conjured into a work of art.

New York Apartment/Bristol will be on show at Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery until 27 September 2015.

Book review – The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer

Posted on March 24, 2015 by Judy

This beautiful, funny, sorrowful book is an impressively assured debut. Drawing on the realities of the modern day health services from the point of view of a ‘service user’, Nathan Filer has woven a tale of sibling love, family grief and mental disintegration that begins with a funeral for a doll at a Dorset campsite.

Filer has been interviewed extensively about the Costa Award-winning book, and is open about the influence of his work as a mental health nurse in creating the world of 19-year-old schizophrenic Matthew Homes. Strikingly, however, he has dug deep in Matt’s state of mind and has devised a variety of means to immerse us in it, including sketches, typefaces and, always, a heart-achingly upfront voice.

This first person account gives Filer a freedom that he has made full, and very skilful, use of. Flipping backwards and forwards through time gives him the opportunity to keep the suspense ramped up, as we revisit crucial moments and sometimes (now putting the unreliability of Matt’s narration to excellent use) encountering several different versions of the same scene. I found his unique style swept me along as I vied to find out the truth – what happened to Matt’s brother Simon on that family holiday in Devon? And what’s happened to Matt since? Continue reading →

Organic shapes with Cheryl Brooks

Posted on March 19, 2015 by Judy

Elderflower buds - lino cr Cheryl Brooks

Organic silhouettes and echoes printed on circles enclosed within squares form the heart of artist Cheryl Brooks’ work. “I lived in Barcelona for eight years and grew very interested in the geometry of Islamic tile patterns – they can’t depict anything natural, so it’s all about the shapes, and they must look perfect, but can never actually be perfect. That was the beginning of the idea for me.”

Drawing these ideas into her own work, Cheryl began to meld it with an obsession with the geometry seen in plant life, and then expanding it.

Geometric Sero - Green & Peach cr Cheryl Brooks

“While in Barcelona I had a dog who was not my dog,” she smiles, “and I would walk in the park with this dog who was not my dog. I began taking lots of close-up photos of the flowers I saw there, examining their intricate forms.”

Back in England, Cheryl continued to explore, developing a series of pieces playing with the visuals of cow parsley, elderflowers and other botanical shapes. “I love taking something small and making it bigger,” she says. “No matter how small the original blossoms are, the natural geometry is still there.”

Long before she realised she wanted to be an artist, Cheryl recognised the joy making things gave her. “I love working with my hands – cutting, pasting and printing,” she says.

The desire to make and create initially led to Cheryl training to be an interior designer, gaining both a BA and MA in the discipline before taking a job designing spaces for pubs and nightclubs. “I eventually left that because it was so stressful and on such a large scale,” she says, “but I still wanted to be in that industry, so I worked with an architect in Cheltenham, still as an interior designer, but on much smaller projects.”

At this time Cheryl began taking a life drawing class, and then left Cheltenham to go travelling. “An Australian friend I had met while travelling asked, what do you really want to do? And I said, be an artist. Then she asked, are you good enough? And that got me thinking.”

With questions like that, who needs a life coach? The result was another BA followed by an MA, both in Fine Art. “So now I was MA squared,” Cheryl grins.

The most important thing she felt she learnt on these courses was how to transfer her ideas into art. “I had all these thoughts in my head and wanted a way to express them, to find my own way to make sense of the world and share this.”

Part of Cheryl’s MA was spent in Barcelona, a city she fell in love with so deeply she returned in about 2004 to make a go of being a full time artist there. “It was really hard,” she admits. “I did have a gallery who sold my work, but still… You have to get used to being very poor, and after a while that’s all you can think about. It gets in the way of the work, of the creating.”

To counteract this, Cheryl trained as an English language teacher, which freed her up to focus fully on creating whenever she had the time. After eight years in Barcelona, though, it felt like time to return to England, this time to Bournemouth with its profusion of foreign students in need of a good language teacher.

Teaching, for Cheryl, is about sharing her knowledge and encouraging others to join in – an ethos that also informs the collaborative art project she launched, titled Image Flowers https://imageflowers.wordpress.com. “We have a series of core images that people can look at and think, that reminds me of… and then produce a work in response to it, or simply submit a photo,” she explains. “The idea it that the initial image is the centre of the flower and each of the responses is a petal. It’s about opening up dialogue. Anyone can get involved.”

Being involved, a part of something bigger, has worked well for Cheryl. While settling into her new Bournemouth life in 2013, Cheryl joined Poole Printmakers. “They’ve been going for over 20 years. It’s a cooperative where you can go and use the presses, meet other printers, do courses. It’s very inspiring!”

Having a space to go and be creative in was especially important to Cheryl at that point. “I was renting a room in a shared house, so had nowhere to work,” she remembers. “These days I have a studio in my own house, where I tend to hand roll the prints, but if I want to use a press I go to the cooperative and make as many as I need.”

The break away from painting to printing made a huge difference to Cheryl’s perception of her work. “Printing takes me away from concentrating too much on the concept and allows me to focus on the image,” she explains. “It allows me to create something more immediate, and by making multiples rather than a single image that takes a long, long time, it means each piece is not so precious.”

Cheryl’s materials emphasise this, as many of her striking round pieces are created using the polystyrene circles you find in the packaging of shop-bought pizzas. “I love the round shape,” she comments. “The polystyrene is very receptive to the oil-based printing inks I like to use. The surface is quite soft so you can create a lot of expressive marks simply by pressing lightly.”

It sounds really satisfying! Cheryl also creates linocuts, which is a lot more challenging but results in a very different effect. “A pizza base plate has a very limited life, while a lino plate will print again and again,” she points out. “The lino is harder which means they’re much more precise. A pizza base will always squidge a little, which produces a very different look.”

This technique for creating prints has in itself formed the idea for another online project, this time in the form of an arts hub called Pizza Base 15 http://pizzabase15.wordpress.com. “It’s a virtual arts centre, with workshops, a café with cake recipes, exhibitions and more,” she explains.

More recently, Cheryl has been taking a course in surface printing on textiles. “I’d like to take it away from fine art and back towards craft,” she says. “I want to explore the possibilities of making things you can actually use and wear rather than just hanging them on a wall – learn about pattern repeats, the dyes and inks you need to use, and try printing with pizza bases onto fabric.”

Cheryl particularly relishes the juxtaposition of circles within squares, a pairing seen in many of her framed works.

“It’s the infinite within the rational,” she says, “The organic world is full of spirals and spheres, but there are no squares in nature. It’s a manmade shape. I love putting the two together.”

Find Cheryl at pizzabase15.wordpress.com, imageflowers.wordpress.com and cherylbrooks.weebly.com.

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