Charms of Lincolnshire
Shaun Castle 31 July 2006
The transvestite potter Grayson Perry, 2003 Turner prize winner and Newsnight regular, has cast his offbeat eye on the bulcolic for a new show at Victoria Miro. The Charms of Lincolnshire is based on obscure art and artifacts from the county collections, interpreted in his own signature ruse. Unlike the idyll lament perpetuated by country museums and shows, Perry’s is a more nuanced affair - at first glance charming, on closer inspection unsettling - the sinister lurking in the corners of the rural mindset, Perry’s familiar doublecrossing. So there’s a cute cream ceramic rabbit - look closer - and it’s written over and over again with the line “God, keep my children safe”. A lark’s lure - that strange object with its shining mirrors, used to charm the birds from the skies before shooting them dead. A crown turns out to be decoration for a coffin. A gravemarker resembles a dagger propped against the wall. Wax dolls, suspended from litte nooses. In rural Lincolnshire, Perry implies, innocence is as routinely corrupted as everything else; always his arguable theme. As certain as was the Victorian sun - there is a black hearse and a rusty childs coffin - intended to be “a non-triumphal monument to all the children who have died too soon”. And of course, there are Perry’s pots - bellicose urns with scenes of rural savagery blooming with flowers bearing faces screaming on the petals. Yet despite the darkness of a past where life was often cut short, the show evokes objects often overlooked, an admiration for the beautifully crafted and eloquent, even in objects of death and sorrow.
The Charms of Lincolnshire, Victoria Miro, N1, runs until Aug 12.
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Hand-Painted Chinoiserie
Shaun Castle 10 July 2006
This picture shows hand-painted chinoiserie hung at Marble House as part of the refurbishment by English Heritage. The brilliantly coloured exotic birds, tiny insects, plants and rich pink and blue flowers against white trees and a cream background took Chinese artists 1,000 hours to create. The paper was designed and painted by the English company de Gournay. It’s made of small pieces of mulberry paper, which are pressed together, then backed with silk, hand-painted, and then glued and stretched on to canvas-covered batons.
The paper is as close as possible to that which Henrietta Howard would have had in her salon at Marble House, the 18th century home of the countess, and mistress to the young George II.
Chinoiserie, an aspect of Rococco, was popular throughout the 17th century, being originally imported by the East India Company from China, but declined in general favour after 1765.
www.degournay.com
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The Past is a Foreign Country
Shaun Castle 07 July 2006
David Lowenthal’s adage The Past is a Foreign Country is an apt description for this faded cartes photograph from around 1850. For the most part, “here and there a few individuals detach themselves from the dark and silence to which time has consigned to them. They walk slowly towards us”, says Gillian Tindall, the master of miniaturist history. Not in this case. The scene intrigues and disturbs, enigmatically. Apparent rural hands hold sticks to a contorted female figure sat across a pipe delivering semi-solid matter to the foreground, overseen by a gentleman charge. Is the female figure human, making for a macabre scene, or a finely made dummy, signifying some offbeat rural rite? Whatever the inference, the scene remains completely alien, lives lost to time. Here, the past is indeed a foreign country.
David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge University Press, 1985
Gillian Tindall, The House by the Thames, Chatto and Windus 2006 Links to this post
Margaret Thatcher at Tallantire Hall
Shaun Castle 06 July 2006
This picture from the archives of the Times & Star shows Margaret Thatcher giving a speech from the balcony of Tallantire Hall on 19th June 1976, in the company of husband Denis and Willie Whitelaw, part of her campaign of rebuilding grass-roots conservatism outside of the Home Counties. Just a year after winning the leadership of the party, and three from becoming prime minister, Margaret Thatcher's speech at Tallantire was already extolling the virtues of closer US ties, which would later frame her premiership. This was the year of the IMF crisis, the Jeremy Thorpe scandal, the hose pipe ban, of Concorde going into service, and the Sex Pistols.
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New Arcadian Journal
Shaun Castle 05 July 2006
Conoisseurially avant-garde, the New Arcadian Journal has provided a unique take on gardens, parks, estates, and their innovators for over 30 years. Each volume is beautifully produced as a fine art book, with a limited edition run of 300. Intelligent and erudite, content is firmly committed to “Gardens” and “Landscape” as cultural and invariably political endeavour, reasserting the rigour of an age when country house building and landscape gardening mattered.
The current volume (57/58) is devoted to the Georgian Landscape of Wentworth Castle and the works of Thomas and William Wentworth in particular, father and son, first and second Earls of Stratford.
£20 from New Arcadian Journal, 13 Graham Grove, Leeds LS4 2NF. Links to this post