What makes a good group show? If thoughtful deployment of a worthwhile theme, high quality works and a good mix of established and less well-known artists sounds like a decent recipe, then ‘Lineages’ at the October Gallery delivers. Obviously line is key to most visual art, but curator Eleri Fanshaw plays on the etymological origins of ‘lineage’ as implying an actual physical line to arrive at an expansive definition of line which brings together works which – in her words – ‘examine how meandering linear threads construct an interlinking nexus of pathways that explore shared and divergent histories, environments and languages’. The ten artists in the show range from past master Gerald Wilde and the most famous contemporary African artist, El Anatsui, to others likely to be less familiar. I’ll concentrate on works by two such artists who make telling use of materials to deal with conceptual content through their own distinctive aesthetic.
Theresa Weber’s relief painting ‘Grass under foot’, 2026 (top), half-depicts, half-maps an abstract Caribbean landscape. The title refers to how the Martinician ecofeminist Suzanne Césaire (1915-66), emphasised the resilience of nature by reference to how grass bounces back from being stepped on: ‘always and everywhere in the slightest manifestations, the primacy of the plant, the plant trampled under foot but still alive’ (in ‘The Malaise of a Civilisation’, 1942). Weber, a Jamaican Greek who grew up in Germany, forms an energy field out of a collage of ceramic elements and symbols of black female empowerment: beads from carnival costumes, and acrylic nails – the latter originated by Caribbean carnival culture in the 1970’s, and now widely adopted in defiance of the historic white-centric view of them as vulgar. The combination suggests that people, too, can return from being trampled under.
Eleanor Lakelin’s human-height ‘Column Vessel #1’, 2026, is also, surprisingly, a collage – of the ‘best bits’ of a horse chestnut. Lakelin works with the ‘life-force’ of sustainably felled trees, and this one has been stripped of bark and washed to emphasise the underlying whiteness of the wood – to such an extent that it would be easy to mistake it for plaster. Those ‘best bits’ are the burrs at which growth occurs, which Lakelin cuts away, moves around and re-fixes. One might read this as a metaphor, somewhat against the current odds, for the maximisation of natural forces. Lakelin also emphasises her human intervention – and perhaps the wider, more troubling human interventions in nature – by topping the sculpture off to suggest a giant urn.
‘Lineages’, running to 28th February at October Gallery, brings together the work of Susanne Kessler, Elisabeth Lalouschek, Theresa Weber, Eleanor Lakelin, Junko Mori, Bev Butkow, Golnaz Fathi, Tian Wei, El Anatsui and Gerald Wilde.
Paul Carey-Kent selects a ‘Gallery of the Month’, a ‘Show of the Month’, a ‘Work of the Month’ and a ‘Book of the Month’ for his weekly column in FAD
