BEHIND THE LINES: Maggs Beneath the Covers #7

 

The Private View for 'Maggs Beneath the Covers' held at Maggs Antiquarian Bookshop 50 Berkeley Square, Mayfair to coincide with the Lapada Art and Antiques Fair was definitely an upper crust affair - even down to the hand-raised, traditional crusty meat pies with lashings of English mustard served alongside the champagne.  There was cake too - quite a spread.  These days it's rare to see so much as a peanut at the average private view.  Curator Penny Green had done us proud and not just with the finger food.

Works by the twelve artists who'd been commissioned to respond in 'extreme and conceptual ways' to Maggs' collections of rare books and manuscripts are beautifully displayed over all four floors of the Georgian town house close to the books that inspired them.  Some are in hallways and others in the garden - including 'books of remembrance' by ceramist Robert Cooper .

 

Penny Green's own work installed on the first floor landing - two seated figures representing the poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning - looks as if it had been there forever.  Look carefully and you can just spot Robert Browning sitting in the sunlight by an orange tree.

 

In curating the exhibition Penny had decided not to have any labels or statements close to any of the work.  A small brochure guides visitors to the general location of each piece and they are left to discover them, or not! depending on their powers of observation.  Some of the interventions are so subtle as to be easily missed.  But that's the fun of this kind of exhibition - it invites curiosity, exploration and active engagement with the site. 

 

 

 

Some of those who came got so into the spirit of discovery that they were found wandering 'off piste' in the dusky underground storerooms and passage-ways trying to decide whether the various piles and accumulations were art-works or just dead stock.  Brave of them I thought, as darkness was falling and the place is notoriously haunted by a broken-hearted 'Mr Havisham' - cruelly jilted on his wedding day.

 

My piece 'Between the  Lines' is sited on the second floor in the Continental and Illuminations Department close to where I'd been standing when I'd first glimpsed 'my' book in Paul Quarrie's hand on the site visit.  I was expecting a special visitor to the private view, Cat Lucas, English Pen's Writers at Risk campaigns manager, and had arranged to meet her there.  Cat had asked me to write a guest post for their website and in yet another example of happenstance the posting and the exhibition opening  co-incided with the release of Salman Rushdie's latest book 'Joseph Anton'.  Censorship, free speech and freedom of artistic expression were hot topics.  

 

 

Between the Lines by Stella Harding

 

Although ultimately the work will have to speak for itself and tell its own story, being there in the room alongside it gave me an opportunity to find out what it has to say to others and to answer questions about it.  A member of Magg's staff had seen the piece prior to the private view, and, knowing little about it, told me it reminded her of a brazier - in which banned books might have been burned. In the sixteenth century when Francesco Ghesi, the book's owner, was writing his defence to charges of heresy it was more than books that were being burned - convicted heretics could face death at the stake.  In recent years we've seen the burning of books and effigies of writers by religious fundamentalists and only a few weeks ago on July 30th, Dang Thi Kim Lieng, the mother of imprisoned Vietnamese blogger Tai Phong Tan, died in a defiant act of self immolation.  She was protesting the detention of her daughter - a former policewoman who'd built up followers around the world with her blogs about police abuses in Vietnam.

 

 

Most people wanted to see the book that had inspired my piece.  Impossible in this case as it had been sold before I'd had the chance to really see it myself.  But imagination is a wondrous thing and as I explained that the small area of 24 carat gold leaf represents the 'footprint' of the book - people began to make connections with other imprints, shadows and memories of lost objects from their own experience.

 

 

When Cat Lucas arrived we were able to connect the small size of the book to the size of Francesco Ghesi's handwriting as he'd written in the spaces between the printed text.  Many prisoners of conscience write under extreme conditions - some write in infinitesimally small script on tiny scraps of paper or rag which can be smuggled out by friends or sympathetic guards.  Handwriting can say so much about a person too and small changes over time often alert human rights observers monitoring a prisoner to changes in their circumstances.

 

I'd enjoyed handwriting a letter to Busra Ersanli, something I haven't done for years, and had been touched to receive her letter in return - hand written after her release pending retrial.  In a sense this project has been as much about the history of human communication as about one book.  The laborious work of stamping individual letters onto the lead strips was juxtaposed by the immediacy of tweeting an update to this blog - telescoping the centuries from Roman times to 21st century social media.  My internet searches, emails to English Pen, blog posts and various digital interconnections are as much a part of the creative process of this project as the final woven lead container.  What connects us as humans isn't the means by which we communicate but the desire to do so.  The desire for freedom of speech and artistic expression will find a way.

 

 

I'm writing this post now as Busra Ersanli and nearly two hundred others face another  trial in Turkey tomorrow October 1st.  In her letter to me Busra wrote of her friend, the translator and women's rights activist Ayse Berktay and whether anything could be done to bring her to attention.  Ayse's name is one of several imprinted on the lead - a small gesture of solidarity.

 

Monday October 1st also sees the hearing in Russia of an appeal by the three members of Pussy Riot, Nadezhada Tolokononikova, Maria Alyokhina and Ekaterina Samutsevich, imprisoned for two years after their peaceful performance protest against Vladimir Putin and leaders of the Orthodox Church who support his repressive measures.  Artist David Shrigley has added his support by designing a T-shirt for Amnesty International and English Pen are holding a Poems for Pussy Riot poetry protest at 11.00am on Monday October 1st at the Champion pub Wellington Terrace, London W2 4LW.  www.englishpen.org/poems-for-pussy-riot-ebook They are asking those who can't attend to write about the event and the ebook of poems on their websites, blogs and Twitter.   

 

 

 

Even the smallest gesture can make a difference to a prisoner of conscience. Sending a book, a letter or postcard of solidarity lets them and their captors know that they are not lost to the eyes of the world. A quick tweet or an email to a government or regime acting in contravention of human rights costs nothing, takes only a few moments and is surprisingly simple to do with modern communications technology.  See English Pen's Rapid Action Network for how to do it. www.englishpen.org

 

If you get the chance please do visit 'Maggs Beneath the Covers'.  Don't be put off by the imposing location and the entry buzzer.  You'll find a warm welcome inside 50 Berkeley Square and the freedom to explore and discover for yourself all the inspiration you could desire.

 

'Maggs Beneath the Covers' is on until 21st December 2012.  9.30- 5.00pm Monday-Friday, closed Saturday and Sunday. Please see www.maggs.com for more information.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SHORE LINE

A new year's Bank Holiday and a rare day out together for me and my partner Robert Cooper as we try to resolve our 'live/work balance' a little.  We fancied a bit of sea air, estuary actually! so headed for one of our favourite shorelines - shh, it's a secret location - if you read on I'll have to kill you! 

The site of a nineteenth century rubbish tip where barges from London would dump and then burn their cargoes on the beach, it's now a  magical, shape-shifting place - drawn, pulled and turned by moon and tide and by the shovels of illicit bottle diggers who excavate deep into the estuary mud hoping to find rare gems of painted pot lids and lemonade bottles.  We come in their wake, searching for a different treasure; broken pot shards, fired and fused glass and clinker and, in my case, body parts.  I'd been told stories of the place by Robert and his ex-student who lives nearby, so I was primed for what might be found there.

When we first visited I was determined not to be seduced by its abundance and approached the shoreline with a circumspect eye.  Robert goes into feeding frenzy in places like this.  An inveterate mudlarker, frustrated archaeologist and collagist he would happily fill carrier bags full of stinking 'rubbish' to pore and ponder over and re-collect in the studio.  (See http://www.robertcooper.net/ for examples)

There's so much concentrated visual information that it takes a while for the eye to focus.  The first things to come into my line of vision were the most familiar - blue and white china shards - almost irresistible, but I have a large collection from other shorelines which I've always intended for mosaic in the garden - one day.  Next, the myriad broken glass bottle necks - so many different shapes, sizes and colours many with the iridescent, rainbow bloom of long immersion in briny mud.  We'd not long before been to Collect where we were intrigued by Hans Stofer's necklaces made from re-cycled bottle necks. Here they were without the price tag - a pick-your-own, DIY version anyway. Then the cup handles, how much tea had once slopped around their shattered bowls?  A nation of tea-drinkers in microcosm. 

Funny how everything comes in useful sometime - some of these bits of blue and white provided inspiration for a plaited paper basket project in 'Practical Basketry Techniques'.

Robert was off the leash and way down the beach as I continued to pick my way through the sedimented  history of glass and ceramics trying to remain aloof.  'I'm not taking any more rubbish home.  We've got more than enough as it is.'  Oh, and then I saw it.  White, smooth-cheeked, with soft curls and soulful eyes - a child's head.  I picked it up and all resolve was lost in the enchantment of the find. 

We've returned again and again. Robert with a mission to find bases or egg-cups or handles or lumps of slumped glass and crazed ceramic - the Victorian beach fires having acted like a secondary kiln firing on all the transfer-printed earthenware, porcelain, stoneware, metal and glass.  I've now trained my eye to search, not for the familiar geometric regularities of circular handles, cylindrical bottle necks and triangular shards but for the anomalous curve and curl of an elbow or hairline, the muddied fingernails of a child's tiny chubby hand or the slim ankle of a Dresden shepherdess.  A fragment of a smile or the unblinking eye of a china doll half buried in green slime is cause for a triumphant shout; Robert! I've found another body part!

A day's finds - scrubbed and cleaned.  The dogs are Robert's - he has an eye for dogs.

I discovered whilst researching the history and traditions of basketry for 'Practical Basketry Techniques' that indigenous Australians made baskets to contain the bones of dead babies.  These shattered body parts from the shoreline have also made me think of the derivation of the term 'basket-case' and how I might incorporate some of the body of basket making history into my work.  But that's another story .................