La Riviere Gentille 2007
Mixed media on paper, 42 sheets
38.1 X 99cm
Louise Bourgeois

A metaphor for memory, for a life looked back upon, Louise Bourgeois’s La Rivière Gentille (2007) is an astonishingly beautiful series on paper that wraps its way in three tiers around the upstairs gallery. Made up of 42 mixed media sheets, each almost a metre long, the series interweaves imagery and phrases from a text the artist wrote in the mid-‘60s which looks back upon her childhood in France. Moments of ecstasy, vivid incidents and dark passages are recollected in a liquid palette of blue, red and black, which snakes its way across each individual sheet. Bourgeois dwells upon sensate experience – the physical world of things and the pleasure they bring – whilst summoning the inexorable, onward flow of existence.

Bourgeois has always lived by a river. From the Creuse in Aubusson, to the Seine in Choisy-le-Roi, to the Bièvre in Antony, the river played a crucial role in her childhood. The water’s high tannin level was needed for the family’s business of tapestry restoration. Bourgeois remembers the dyed skeins drying in the trees. She remembers the colours of the flowers of the garden that her parents planted along the river’s bank.

Like all of Bourgeois’s imagery, there is contradiction. While water can be a metaphor for the origins of life, the passing of time and reverie, it also stands for destruction, the black well of depression, and a place to commit suicide. Bourgeois’s images of rivers are like the umbilical cord that ties her to her mother. The river acts like an unbroken thread that weaves the past and present together.

In all of Bourgeois’s works, colours and motifs are imbued with emotional meaning. Blue represents peace, meditation and escape; black its opposite; and red blood and insistence. The gentleness of the title is borne out through imagery. Pencil-drawn horizontal lines traverse the sheets like the staves that mark music paper, a device that also features in the portfolio work Nothing to Remember (2004 – 6) and of which Bourgeois has explained:

‘It is very peaceful to look at the lines of the staff paper. It gives a rhythm…. it gives a passive direction to the horizontal plane and it gives an active direction to the vertical plane.’ Often the meandering course of a river is described as hundreds of corpuscular forms, strongly suggesting the vessels of the body. These relate to the ‘cumuls’, cloud-like shapes that have been a recurrent feature in Bourgeois’s work since the late 1960s that she values for instilling a sense of reassurance and calm. Lines, flowing through all of La Rivière Gentille, are themselves a source of comfort: ‘The repetitive motion of a line, to caress an object, the licking of wounds, the back and forth of a shuttle, the endless repetition of waves, rocking a person to sleep, cleansing someone you like, an endless gesture of love.’

darkness sunk in the floor

Shibboleth 2007
Doris Salcedo

The Lady of Shalott 1888
Oil on Canvas
John William Waterhouse

This painting illustrates Alfred Tennyson’s poem The Lady of Shalott. Draped over the boat is the fabric the lady wove in a tower near Camelot. But she brought a curse on herself by looking directly at Sir Lancelot.With her right hand she lets go of the chain mooring the boat. Her mouth is slightly open, as she sings ‘her last song’. She stares at a crucifix lying in front of her. Beside it are three candles, often used to symbolise life. Two have blown out. This suggests her life will end soon, as she floats down the river.

“[T]hings things always and memories I say them as I hear them murmur them in the mud” –– Samuel Beckett, How It Is (1964)

Miroslaw Balka’s box of darkness is disturbing in its historical echoes but beautiful as well. The Times

Miroslaw Balka’s black hole at Tate Modern is terrifying, awe-inspiring and throught-provoking. It embraces you with a velvet chill. The Guardian

The Unilever Series How It Is by Polish artist Miroslaw Balka is a giant grey steel structure with a vast dark chamber, which in construction reflects the surrounding architecture - almost as if the interior space of the Turbine Hall has been turned inside out. Hovering somewhere between sculpture and architecture, on 2 metre stilts, it stands 13 metres high and 30 metres long. Visitors can walk underneath it, listening to the echoing sound of footsteps on steel, or enter via a ramp into a pitch black interior, creating a sense of unease.

Underlying this chamber is a number of allusions to recent Polish history – the ramp at the entrance to the Ghetto in Warsaw, or the trucks which took Jews away to the camps of Treblinka or Auschwitz, for example. By entering the dark space, visitors place considerable trust in the organisation, something that could also be seen in relation to the recent risks often taken by immigrants travelling.

Balka intends to provide an experience for visitors which is both personal and collective, creating a range of sensory and emotional experiences through sound, contrasting light and shade, individual experience and awareness of others, perhaps provoking feelings of apprehension, excitement or intrigue.

annie

Cattrell works with a variety of materials and skills. She is drawn to working with glass because of its transparency and ability to reveal. Using different techniques she pushes the boundaries of can be achieved with glass, both physically and conceptually. Making the invisible visible and the ethereal solid, Cattrell offers a view of what is inside us and around us.

Her work captures moments in time, fleeting things, clouds on a particular day, a breath inside a human lung. Her subjects stem from her interest in areas such as neuroscience, anatomy and meteorology, and she is drawn to the fusion between science and art.

'I choose the familiar, for example a cloud, so whatever language you speak there is a kind of universal understanding. It is the transformation and freezing into three-dimensions of this iconographic subject matter that interests me: what happens when you contemplate something you think you know but shouldn't really be seeing this way. This three-dimensional vantage point allows the viewer to examine the subtle shifts and rhythms which ceaselessly occur in the natural world and within the body.'

iniva

(Institute of International Visual Arts)


Good online resource for talks, events, exhibitions, books and contemporary artists - both renowned and/or recently established.


http://www.iniva.org/home


e.g

Nilbar Güres (because it makes me smile)

Playing with a Watergun 2010
Photograph
180 X 120cm
Nilbar Güres

Using a variety of media including photography, collage, drawing, and textiles, Güres produces theatrical tableaux of women, moving between performance and the everyday. Her first solo show in the UK will run from 10 Dec - 5 Jan 2011.

ernest

This is a picture of a picture of Gregorio Fuentes, the fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea - a story which Hemmingway wrote in Cuba in 1951 and which was the final work published in his lifetime, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He said it was 'the best I can write in all of my life'.

Found in a small fishing village, 2 hours from Havana

I love this picture. I love the act of him throwing the net into the wind and the freedom with which it then moves, as if the great force of the sea is instilled within it. The power of the wind echoes that of the tide so that the net embodies the traveling white horses, that dance on the surface with the delicacy of lace despite the rising power beneath. 

hemmingway

I visited his house in Cuba in the summer. It was wooden and there were cats and trees and globes and books. Infact there was the most exquisit collection of objects, preserved and suspended in time.

lovely videos

http://www.tellnoone.co.uk/


Seaweed from Tell No One on Vimeo.

Three verticals at approx 30 second intervals, 11.42 - 11.43am
 21 Jan 2009
Saltburn-by-the-sea 2010
Pencil on card (3 parts)
49 X 35.5cm each
Richard Forster