On ‘Spirits of the Riverbank’

The First Show

This collaborative project started with an artists’ residency in August 2023, at the International Kuenstlerhaus of Kebbel Villa, which is a contemporary art museum incorporating an artist residency programme located in Schwandorf-Fronberg, Bavaria, Germany. I was lucky enough to go with three artists that I have been working with since we all studied our MA together at Chelsea College of Arts, lovely and talented friends hailing from England, Canada and Brazil. The two-week residency culminated in an exhibition of the new work in Kebbel Villa’s first floor galleries, link to website here.

My own work over this time returned to considerations of a project called ‘Oh Ill Thief’, after an uncanny interaction with a hare in a Nuremberg graveyard (the subject of this blog post written while on the residency). This project had become a film in 2019; now, inspired by the Renaissance drawings of Albrecht Dürer I created a series of drawings to explore some of the psychological states, interactions, relationships of the characters in the ‘Oh Ill Thief’ world.

The Second Show

The second iteration of ‘Spirits of the Riverbank’ was given the sub-title ‘From the Naab to the Thames’ as a playful way to describe the movement from one river to the other, as the works begun in Bavaria travelled back home to London, where the four of us are based, more or less. Myself and my collaborators wanted to show the results of our residency to our home crowd, as it were; I am also in the process of moving back to Glasgow so it was important to me to have an exhibition in London before I officially left the city.

We had visited the Metre Squared space in West Kensington for a show back in May, where a few friends, people we knew from our MA at Chelsea, had organised a group exhibition of about 12 artists (one of these artists was Dedeia, so she unfortunately ended up exhibiting in the same place twice in one year). Upon entering I was immediately attracted by the interesting texture of the space, the fact it was artist-run and not for profit, and the projection room behind a bookcase in the main event space that was perfect for film reels; when we did the first show in Germany I had a hankering to show my ‘Oh Ill Thief’ film alongside the drawings as they were a different manifestation of the same project. However this didn’t end up working out as the old work was less urgent to show than the residency work, and my artist colleagues had made new film works and projections that took primacy. But when we had the chance to do this second show, the potential of the projection room meaning I could properly show the 2019 film alongside the new drawings put the Metre Squared space at the top of our venue list.

I chose to destroy the drawings I made in Germany (aside from one made on cardboard, which I left behind in Bavaria); I felt they were the start of something interesting, but they were not fully realised yet. Indeed, they represent my first ever solo fully committed drawing project; drawings as final outcome. I felt I could do better, with the techniques I’d played with in the residency studio. There was something about the red-brown, dark brown and creamy whites that felt very traditional, Old Master-ish; the tonal contrasts and contrasts between tight detail and rough gesture that seemed to give them some energy; I also enjoyed the sweatiness or glossiness of the skin, built up through tone with chalk pencil and oil pastel on top of the pencil and pen.

I also felt that destroying the works where they were made in Bavaria was appropriate for the themes of destruction, cultural loss and societal devastation of the ‘Oh Ill Thief’ project, reflecting its inherent transience. The drawings were also made on thin brown packaging paper; this paper did not last well, crumpling and tearing whenever I moved it around, nor did a lot of the media I was using adhere to it very strongly and I thought the degradation the drawings were likely to go through meant they probably weren’t worth re-exhibiting anyway. The use of this ephemeral, cheap, common kind of paper was deliberate though; I just used a slightly thicker version for the next drawing series after I got back from Germany.

The four new drawings I made I was satisfied with. The last of them, the large face with scabby cat’s eyes, is an image I have painted, made collages of and drawn many, many times before; it has never come out the way I really want it to; the final result never seems to have the raw power of the gaze that I feel it could achieve. So this large drawing, one of the biggest drawings I’ve ever undertaken at 83.5 cm by 75cm, was made even more challenging by depicting an almost impossible subject. It came to the venue in one piece; I had already decided before installing that I would cut the face clean in half. It worked a lot better after that; the disruption of the space between the two halves and the ferocity of the eyes staring while the viewer’s brain tried to bring the face back together in the mind’s eye, while being disrupted by the textured brick and concrete walls, seemed to increase the work’s intensity as well as connecting it to the wider environs.

Lastly, I wanted to note a few of the reasons why we chose to make a show such as the one we made. In the one instance, it was dictated by what time, spaces and resources we actually had available to us in the real world. In another, after exhibiting the project in such a beautiful, parquet-floored, elegant villa as the gallery in Germany, we liked the idea of choosing a very alternative space to show the same work. I liked the semi-derelict, eccentric, grotty texture of the space as previously mentioned. But also the space had the capacity for music and performance, which we decided to embrace by having Brian and his electronic music group perform a set for us which they had written in response to the themes of the show. I also decided to read out a poem, ‘Oh Ill Thief’, written in 2016, that added another dimension to the project so far represented in drawing and film. We played with the lights, had music as well as the performances, and used the live performance element, although casual, to activate the space in different ways as the evening progressed. We were interested in doing a visual art event that was a bit alternative, more interesting, than what most group shows end up being, by combining the work with social, performative and environmental interventions.

My full film ‘Oh Ill Thief’ (2019) can be viewed on Vimeo here. The film will also be shown as part of group exhibition ‘A Conversation with Water’ curated by Lorraine Snape and Eva Brá Barkardóttir in Stratford, London, from 19th January to 18th February 2024 (further information here).