Esme Hamer: Screen II 21 x 29cm acrylic yarn, £115
Esme Hamer: Screen III 21 x 29cm acrylic yarn, £115
Inter Woven: 9th – 30th July
Interwoven brings together 7 contemporary textile artists using traditional craft techniques to reinterpret the present. The work featured spans beading, weaving, textile printing and crochet. Through reconnection with this slow, labour-intensive way of working the artists question the rapid pace of contemporary technology and invite time for reflection.
The artworks highlight textile craft not as a fixed tradition but as an evolving conversation between materials, makers and the world we inhabit. Familiar techniques become investigations of ecology, technology, domestic space, memory and social history. The results challenge expectations and demonstrate that craft is not simply a method of production but a way of questioning, recording and connecting.
Wishful Thinking…..
The Lockdown Paintings of Nicholas Borden
The video of this exhibition has now been posted on Youtube:
Exhibition at Town House 19th June – 4th July, booking not required to visit the gallery
Town House welcomes Nicholas Borden back to the gallery here for an exhibition of his lockdown paintings. He always works from life, taking his easel out with him in rain or shine and he continued to work this way during lockdown, with added views from his windows. So of necessity, many of his subjects in Wishful Thinking were painted locally in East London where he lives – although he did occasionally venture further afield.
This way of working always lends a vibrancy and immediacy to Nicholas’ work that combine to convey a sense of ‘being there’ to the viewer. The works in this exhibition have a particular intensity however, perhaps the result of the circumstances and isolation imposed by lockdown, but also perhaps a response to a more urgent need he felt to record what he saw around him during the pandemic.
What Nicholas recorded in paint was what we all experienced in lockdown: going for a walk, visiting parks and looking at gardens whether from outside or in, the Wishful Thinking of the title for those who had no access to their own outdoor space.
Nicholas Borden’s exhibition ‘Wishful Thinking’ will be on sale at Town House in Fournier Street and on the home page of the website from Saturday 19th June – Sunday 4th July. Please note we will be closed on Mondays and Tuesdays while restrictions remain in force. No booking necessary
Town House in Lockdown 6: James Mackinnon
Which brings me to the last painting in this Town House in Lockdown exhibition. It’s by James Mackinnon and it’s an appropriate one to end with as the very first piece of East End art I encountered was by James. It was a long while ago in 1994 and ‘London Fields East: The Ghetto’ was an exhibition at the Museum of London and the memory of peering in through the windows of that extraordinary model of Ellingfort Road in Hackney stayed with me for a long while afterwards. The street was due to be demolished, but was being occupied by squatters at the time, many of them artists.
So, as my journey with East London art started unwittingly with a piece by James Mackinnon, it feels fitting that this lockdown exhibition should end with his Tower at Night, London Fields from 2012. It was the last in a series of paintings of the area around London Fields where he used to live.
To me this has that magical sense of a perfectly still night, that beautiful moon shining, not a breath of wind, like some of the beautiful nights with a spectacular moon we’ve had in lockdown. No cars out, or people walking around but the sense that people are still there in a multi coloured patchwork of urban life. When I stood in the gallery and looked at this painting I wondered what it would look like if someone switched those lights off….
As soon as lockdown started, I really wanted to to cycle into central London to see it as I’d never seen it before. I expected to find it rather beautiful, the buildings, uncluttered by hordes of visitors, finally revealed in all their glory. Instead I found it very sad, depressing even. The doors of St Paul’s were tightly shut with no one on the steps, just one other cyclist there having a look. Unlike this painting there was no lit window to reassure me that there was someone inside, that life was carrying on as normal. This was very definitely not normal and it made me realise that beautiful as they are, these city landmarks are made by the presence of people. The loss of that same buzz of visitors that I’ve noticed in my empty shop is magnified many times over looking at a tightly shut and desolate St Paul’s.
Which brings me back to Doreen’s Mile End Park. I’ve realised that because it doesn’t look like a city view, I don’t feel the need to find people in it, to see life going on behind the façade; it feels rural rather than urban. It’s the city views that need people, without them they are sad, just as central London has been sad in these terrible last weeks.
And that’s what I’ve taken from hanging these paintings together here: yes, East End art is about the buildings and the loss of them, the shops and markets, the poverty, even the beauty, but more than anything else I’ve realised during lockdown it’s about people and it’s about community.
You can see the video of the whole exhibition here:-
Town House in Lockdown 5: Doreen Fletcher
Living close to Peri at the same period was Doreen Fletcher. In fact, they knew each other as both were part of the same community of artists in the 80s although their work and whole approach to it was very different. Neither were born East Enders and whereas Peri seems to have taken a while to respond to it emotionally as a subject, Doreen knew when she arrived that she had to paint these dilapidated streets that were under threat before it was too late.
Mile End Park at Twilight was painted in 1983, shortly after Doreen’s arrival in the East End and the gasometer looms over the terrace in Cooperfield Road, illustrating the fading dominance of industry in the East End. It was the target of many bombing raids during the war and its position in the midst of the maze of little streets caused terrible bomb damage, which eventually led to the plans to re-develop the area long after the war. Here the terrace sits, awaiting its fate, shuttered and secured to prevent squatters and vandals.
Doreen is an optimist at heart though: she could have shown the buildings derelict as we saw in Peri Parkes’ painting and the palette could have been much gloomier. Instead Doreen has chosen to paint the scene at sunset, with a glorious multi coloured sky and a hopeful burst of light in the distance. And although we don’t see them, we sense there are still people inside: windows are lit and the street lights are shining, negating the effect of the dark and shuttered terrace.
The second of Doreen’s paintings I hung always looks like an 18th century painting of a Suffolk village by a young Thomas Gainsborough to me, although I suppose if you look closely the Tandoori Curry shop sign is a bit of a giveaway. It’s definitely not a typical East End painting though: no run-down buildings here, these are painted in cheerful colours, well kept, with pretty windows and a nice area of neatly mown grass in front. This is Mile End Park with Church from 1988 and although I hung it in chronological order in the gallery I’m going to return to it in the next post….
A short video of the exhibition is available to view on YouTube:-
Town House in Lockdown 4: Peri Parkes
Unlike John Allin and Rose Henriques, the next artist, Peri Parkes, had trained at the Slade and moved to the East End after the break-up of his marriage: a friend was living there and Peri, trying to make his way as an artist, couldn’t afford anywhere else. This is one of a series of paintings executed when he was living in that prefab in Conder Street, Limehouse and dates to around 1982.
It’s another ‘backs of houses’ and is the fourth in Peri’s sequence of the street. Earlier on in the series the emphasis is on the rigorous measuring technique which he’d been taught at the Slade, the subject is just what’s available to him out of his window. But gradually you can see him being drawn in emotionally and he becomes fixated on the wall in the foreground that gradually disintegrates from one painting to another and a patch of moss that was cleaned off it. He wrote: ‘at the very beginning there was a rich snakeskin pattern of moss down the wall, one day it was scraped away, nonetheless I have determined that its absence remains the main focus of the painting’. For him these paintings become an allegory of the passage of time and so there is an air of forlorn dereliction to the painting without the signs of life in Walter Steggles’ painting even though the subject is similar. There’s just a faint air of decay and emptiness.
Except when I hung it in the gallery, I noticed something I’d never spotted before in this: the very faint head of a child looking out of the window, which is now the first figure to appear in one of Peri’s paintings. From this point on the East End becomes more than just whatever’s outside his window for Peri, it starts to get under his skin and the buildings with rubble outside that had been derelict and lifeless in his work, start to become inhabited and take on a life of their own
For a short video of the whole exhibition see the link below:-