Whenever I camp I cry. I’ve bought tents from bootsales for a couple of quid and watched as the fly sheet was ripped away in a storm, leaving me exposed to the elements with nothing but my rain-sodden sleeping bag for warmth. I’ve sat in tents where every corner was laden with so many critters you’d think I’d entered a bushtucker trial, and laid awake at night listening to my neighbour use our pathway as her own personal toilet. Whenever I camp I cry, yet I can’t stop myself from returning.
It is through the work of Eva Dixon we’re transported back to the campsite that I so often love to hate. Descended from a family of miners and construction workers, she is fascinated by how things are assembled and creates work from found materials collected over time. The canvas frame is so often the main event, seeing planks of wood nailed together, where materials ranging from clingfilm to camping fabric, denim and plastic, are fastened, draped, clamped, and fixed to winches. Her work highlights the satisfaction of process and takes us back to the delight gleaned from stamping a peg into the dry, cracking ground, or watching the walls of your tent stand to attention as you tighten each guy rope. For a work that is built from harsh textures and angular forms, it’s also imbued with so much pleasure.
In a recent show alongside Benedikte Klüver, both artists are displayed as masters at recreating Feel. We’re told in the exhibition text that these makers are bound by their use of layering and their sensitivity to colour (both truths), yet it’s their ability to personify Feel that truly unites them. Their recent exhibition Lands End at 10 Greatorex Street explores this tenfold.
But what is Feel exactly? And why does this word make so much sense here?
Feel is being transported to experiencing the soft layer of heat on your back, as you emerge from your tent at 9am. It’s sitting in your camping chair with your eyes closed, listening to the pitter patter of rosé being poured from cardboard box to plastic cup. It’s in these small moments of warmth that Klüver’s paintings exist. Hailing from Scandinavia – a region famed for its long, dark winters – her technicolour works create a refreshing contrast to the harsh landscape of her childhood, and are instead inspired by the piercing natural light that the artist experienced during a winter spent in Japan. Her resulting works are soft and buttery, but also are also tangy and refreshing, and manage to recreate the effect of morning light cutting through the opening of a curtain.
In these works Feel isn’t just some innate, metaphysical thing, but is also a pertinent reference to touch. Perhaps I’m just particularly thirsty at the moment (it is retrograde after all), or perhaps it’s an obvious observation, but there’s a sexiness which undercuts a lot of the work on display, that injects a playful naughtiness to the otherwise sensible and pragmatic emblems of home DIY that crop up throughout the show. If this exhibition takes me back to being in a tent, then it’s hot, sweaty and steamin’ up.
First we see the ten blue stars that have been sneezed across Dixon’s Charlie Lima (2024), as if added as a sign of praise. They crop up on other works too, such as Southern Cross (2024) and at the corner of Sloane Star (2024), whose billowing veil is clamped to its frame by two vices, and a single blue star is placed loosely on its sheer fabric. If the hints at gratification were not enough to convince you of this heat, there’s the hoists and rope suspending the work I’m 50 (2024), which is giving a sort of red room meets B&Q vibe. Of course, this all may seem like a reach, but lest we forget that Christian Grey did stake out Anna in a hardware store.
Secondly, there’s the allusion to uncovering, which both artists subtly do in their works. In Dixon’s, we have the exposed frames whose skeletal appearance peeks behind sheets of lamé and clingfilm or are slowly hidden away by fabric cloaks stretched across panels by buckled braces (see First Aider (2024)). With Klüver, the thin application of paint in Precious (2023) provides glimpses of the canvas beneath and is less brash than works such as Dixon’s Charlie Lima. Instead, this work could be read as either sultry or coy, where pigment stands in as a sort of lingerie.
If Dixon’s pieces are naughty, then Klüver’s paintings are the cold shower that we crave. A meditative balm to the bustle of Whitechapel, whose sirens howl just metres beyond the gallery walls, you’d be fooled into thinking that the artist created her work in a matter of moments. Instead, her placement of colour is done after much consideration and we are left with pieces such as Theatre (2024), whose chalk-like application of paint is made even more delicious through the careful positioning of blues, reds and yellows. Without fear of being to colour-wheel-chaos, her clever inclusion of oppositional tones highlights the tranquil qualities of the cooler greens and blues, it’s simple colour theory, but boy does it work.
Both artists are excellent at creating small worlds by drawing from multiple histories. Klüver references her own relationship with light, weather and place over time. Whilst Dixon captures the history of those whomst her second-hand patches and fabric may have once belonged. This alchemy has resulted in a show that has taken me to 1000 different conclusions, eliciting dozens of memories, and sparking that fizzing, fudgy, smushy thing that happens in the stomach when you’re transported back to a particular time or place. Lands End isn’t a direct reference to camping or festivals at all but instead has pulled my own memories out of my brain and onto this page. I am in turn reminded that whenever I camp I may indeed cry, but I also laugh too.
Lands End was curated by MAMA and exhibited at 10 Greatorex Street between 12-14 April 2024.
