Blake’s Heaven - 2010
BLAKE’S HEAVEN @ the Guildhall, Priory Park, Chichester, 3rd -9th of July 2010, overlapping with Chichester Festivities (25 June–11 July 2010) and with the Real Ale and Jazz Festival in the park (Fri 2nd/Sat 3rd July and Fri 9th/Sat 10th July 2010).
Note: At 1 o’clock each day the artists present will talk about their work and that of the other Artel members.
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Artists exhibiting:
- Catherine Somerville,
- David Pratt,
- Helena Hines,
- Jacqueline Knee,
- Jayne Sandys-Renton,
- Jo Higgs,
- Juliet Larken,
- Margaret Marks,
- Maureen Brigden,
- Robert Olliver-Jones,
- Sarah Hartland,
- Tim Sandys-Renton
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Catherine Somerville: ‘Constellation’ (£1500) and ‘Golden Eye’ (£700). My work has been influenced by William Blake’s thinking and my own experiences of the mystical connections we seem to make as human beings. The experience of a vision such as the exquisite beauty of a beam of sunlight reflected in a puddle of water can move me more than I can explain. This phenomenon causes me to reflect on an eternal life cupped in a spiritual structure. Blake believed such visions revealed to him the spiritual structure of the world, as well as the relationship between God and man, and good and evil.
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David Pratt: ‘Moment’ (£3,500) Moment explores the relationship between memory and location, particularly in regard to events. This work borne out of thoughts, or more feelings related to Blake’s poem Jerusalem, contrasts the fleeting ungraspable nature of the present with memories constantly revisited. - memories that shape the way we perceive ourselves as being. ‘Memory’ more commonly classified as a cerebral function, is here explored in the physical sense, approached by such words as ‘to venerate’ or ‘hallow’ - the act of bringing the past and present together, a re-remembering. In this building Blake’s line ‘and did those feet in ancient times’ carries an extra poignancy as it echoes in some way our awareness of the poet’s own presence on this spot. Moment takes the form of a portable ark or reliquary to an undefined piece of ground - a transitory location, both on the land and in our minds.
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Helena Hines: ‘Opacity and Translucence (or, Imagination and The National Debt)’, 2010, Linen Ikea curtain, burlap, calico, muslin, and silver with transfer.
Blake’s world view was founded on the Bible and ‘Paradise Lost’. Today, the obscurity of epic works like ‘Jerusalem’, can rival that of Old Testament prophecies. Yet prophecy is always contextual, challenging contemporary mind-set. Despite his detestation of organised religion, enveloping Blake’s character was a relationship of love with Christ; real-time intimate friend, redeemer of the world, ‘Word’ made flesh. Like it or not as a visual artist, I find words possess the ultimate power to fire imagination. Combining image and word, Blake obscured and wrong-footed simplistic interpretation. An image outlines another’s imagined vision, and we think, “not this, but something else” … In this foundry of uncertainty Blake, like Los, the artist, forges his gift to us. He primes our imagination to question, discover and invent; to collaborate in the restoration of our right mind.
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Jacqueline Knee: ‘Innermost Shrine of the Imagination’, nfs. This work is a response to a drawing of Blake’s called “A vision: the inspiration of the poet” which depicts a seated figure writing in a shrine within a large chamber. I was struck by the idea of “the innermost shrine of the imagination” and how the notion of a container is used to describe imaginative thought, or the presence of an inner life. The cage-like construction is an evocation of Blake’s vivid mental state.
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Jayne Sandys-Renton: ‘Portions of Eternity’, (£1500) each side, Oil on board. My response to Blake comes from an image appropriated from the photographer David LaChapelle – a woman encapsulated in a bubble of glass floating above the material world. To me she embodies a spiritual being that is not of this world, taking on human form but transcending the constrictions of human life. For Blake, the spirit is free, and “the spiritual body or angel is true man.” His world represents “portions of eternity seen in imaginative vision”.
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Jo Higgs: ‘Onvermogen’ (£969)
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Juliet Larken: ‘The Path’ DVD/film. Local legend has it that William Blake wrote “Jerusalem”, the poem that became the hymn, while looking out over St Roche’s hill, just north of Chichester. Chalkpit Lane runs up and down this hill, a white track from base to summit and back: a great sense of ancient footsteps ring out as one treads it and I do so often. I have made a midsummer film of it, one an ascent near sunrise and the other a descent at sunset. It is a record of a short traverse over land that led Blake to wonder about the holiness beneath our feet, the mystery of awakening and how stories of freedom are carried like torches across continents, across time.
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Margaret Marks: ‘Tiger Tiger, Burning’, ‘Fearful Symmetry’, ‘What Dread Hand?’. 3 Films on DVD (each £30). My work is influenced by Blake’s well known poem “The Tyger”. Today it has resonance with issues of deforestation and conservation.
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Blake imagined the tiger as the embodiment of God’s power in creation, it being both terrifying and awesome in its appearance and vitality. However, mortal hand has decimated the tiger to the brink of extinction. Its natural habitat is being burnt down. Their pelts sell for £100,000. Their skeleton and entrails are ground up for Chinese medical cures. Mankind will soon have obliterated them.
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Maureen Brigden: ‘Heavenly Bodies’, Ceramic keys (£85), Metal key (£250). Blake was concerned about the welfare of the children of his time. He honours children, their lives often cut short by disease, poverty and appalling work conditions. In his poem, “The Chimney Sweeper”, the innocent child chimney sweep laments whilst the voice of experience justifies the child’s labours. The child waits for an angel with a key to release his earthly toil, suggesting that all rewards are in Heaven. The key is used as a metaphor for the nature of our lives, our hopes and fears, and our striving nature, reflected by the shapes and contortions of the keys reaching for perfection.
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Robert Olliver-Jones: ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ (£5,500). William Blake’s Songs of Innocence are full of truisms; the joys of innocence are short-lived and that there is not necessarily a reason why some suffer.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.
(Auguries of Innocence)
My work ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ explores the paradox of the biblical flood myth, a story inspired by an historical event of such catastrophic proportions that prophets had to attribute it to a vengeful deity. Logic tells us that innocent and guilty perished together and we are left with the question “How could a just God allow such injustice?”
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Sarah Hartland: ‘Who made Thee?’ 2010, Mixed media,
Book 1: ‘Manufactured’ (£100)
Book 2: ‘Hand made’ (£200)
Book 3: ‘Man made’ (£200)
In William Blake’s poetry the innocent lamb becomes a more complex symbol than that of the Lamb of God. Blake questions the nature of this animal’s creator, repeatedly asking’ “Who made thee?” Even in the ‘Songs of Innocence’ Blake seems uncertain and he interrogates his religious faith. These sheep trophies continue to shed doubt on an omnipotent creator and simultaneously refer to art, craft and industrialisation. Each lamb is concerned with the origins of agricultural animals bred for specific farming demands. Has the lamb simply become reduced into being a product?
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Tim Sandys-Renton: ‘Ir/rational Man’, (£3500), Stainless Steel and photograph.
“He who sees the infinite in all things, sees God. He who sees the ratio only, sees himself only.” W.Blake (1788).
Does this represent Isaac Newton, whose work on ‘ratios’ fore-grounded current scientific discoveries, including particle physics? Quarks and other such particles rely on theoretical dimensions far beyond the four we’re able to experience, and the only way to ‘see’ them at all is indirectly via the beautiful tracks they leave behind when they collide in the CERN particle accelerator.
OR is this a Blake-esque vision of the ‘infinite’? The serpent from the Garden of Eden incapacitates its victim, the “self-obsessed” human who’s turned from God, “falling into the abyss of time and space”, represented by a single-dimension image that has no substance or experience?
