Wild Camden.
Posted: January 6, 2017 Filed under: Amusements, Artistic London, Bohemian London, Events, Interiors, Public Announcements, Wildlife | Tags: Almuth Tebbenhof, Andrzej Maria Borkowski, Camden art, Christopher Reid, Danuta Sołowiej, Heather Barnett, Jens Schaumann, Julia Schrader, Katy Evans-Bush, London art galleries, Marzena Pogorzały, Natalia Zagórska-Thomas, Roisin Tierney, Studio Ex Purgamento 1 Comment
Natalia Zagórska-Thomas wearing Julia Schrader. Photo © Jens Schaumann.
DS: Well, we managed to negotiate our way out of 2016 only to find 2017 looming before us like a rogue ice shelf. Yet although the festive season was full of foreboding there were occasional moments of optimism amidst the gloom; one of the most enjoyable events in my pre-Christmas calendar was the private view of Call of the Wild at Studio Ex Purgamento in Camden.
Antlers © Julia Schrader.
Visitors to the gallery are often wrong-footed by the address; it is located in a second-floor extension in a private home, a flat that belongs to artist and conservator Natalia Zagórska-Thomas and her husband Simon. If there was ever an enterprise that demonstrated devotion to an ideal of what art can and should be, Studio Ex Purgamento is it.
Going into the Thing Seriously; or These Influences Have Been Exerted for Good. © Natalia Zagórska-Thomas (alternative titles provided for the artist by Diane Williams).
Profit, apart from a tiny percentage above a certain price to try to recover some costs, goes to artists directly. Some years we sell a lot; others, not at all. I want to show established names alongside lesser known artists whose work interests me, and to mix visual art forms with text, design, performance, architecture, design, music and science. I show many Polish artists to promote their profile and contribution to the culture of the city.
As to the current show, Natalia describes it thus: This is not a tidy show. This is not a tidy subject. What I wanted is what I think I always want: a contemporary version of the cabinet of curiosities, a camera obscura, an idiosyncratic collection of specimens picked up along the way. It feels like life: messy, chaotic, undisciplined, joyous, violent and confusing.
Pale Blue Hexapod © Danuta Sołowiej.
Somehow, Natalia has managed to fit work by 25 artists into her small gallery; these include sculptures by Almuth Tebbenhof, Danuta Sołowiej, and Andrzej Maria Borkowski, wearable art by Julia Schrader, photographs by Jens Schaumann, Marzena Pogorzały (whose images of massive Antarctic ice sheets are elegant visual tokens of the strangled metaphor I opened with) and your own correspondent. The show also features an extraordinary ‘biological’ installation by Heather Barnett, and poems by such luminaries (and friends of The London Column) as Roisin Tierney, Christopher Reid and Katy Evans Bush.
Ice 3. © Marzena Pogorzaly.
© Andrzej Maria Borkowski.
You hardly need me to tell you that the London art scene is full of bullshit, any more than you need me to tell you that 2017 could be a rough year. We will need all the optimism we can get our hands on; and any blows against philistinism or the dead weight of cultural conformity are as welcome as they are necessary. As Katy Evans-Bush writes in Call of the Wild‘s exhibition catalogue: ‘At the time of going to print no one knows what’s going to happen next. Old ways of being uncivilised are being exhumed and new ones invented. The one thing we do know is that we will need to call on all our most civilised impulses – as well as our deepest, wildest aardvark’. Or, to put it another way, if you think the world is going to end tomorrow, plant a tree today. (Who said that? Answers on a postcard to …)
Ruan Minor, Cornwall, 1978. © David Secombe.
Gallery photos by Natalia.
Call of the Wild runs at Studio Ex Purgamento until 15 January; open weekends from 11 am — 6 pm. To visit during the week, call for an appointment. (132D Camden Street, London NW1 0HY; 07799 495549; info@studioexpurgamento.com. http://www.studioexpurgamento.com.)
Heartbreak Hotel, Holborn.
Posted: November 3, 2016 Filed under: Housing, Interiors | Tags: Holborn hotels, Peter Ackroyd London the Biography, sad hotels, Tim Hadrian Marshall Comments Off on Heartbreak Hotel, Holborn.
Photo: Tim Hadrian Marshall.
From Barton Fink, Joel and Ethan Coen, 1990:
Chet: Are you a trans or a res?
Barton: Excuse me?
Chet: Transient or resident?
Barton: Oh, I don’t know. I’ll be here indefinitely.
D.S.: Tim Marshall, a regular contributor to The London Column, recently brought this set of photos to my attention. They are souvenirs of a bleak period in his life when, in search of ‘a quiet place to hide’, he checked in to one of those big Art Deco hotels that loom like sentinels across Holborn. Tim’s state of mind is indicated by the fact that he renewed the booking on a daily basis, which meant that he was constantly shifting from room to room, becoming both transient and resident at the same time.
Photography is full of sad hotel rooms; Tim’s pictures remind me of canonical images by Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, William Egglestone and others. They also bring to mind scenes from 1940s film noir, not to mention the aforesaid Barton Fink and, of course, The Shining. But all those references are American; most of the sad hotels referenced in British culture are of the sad, faded or seedy boarding house type, the ones found in Graham Greene or Patrick Hamilton novels, Larkin’s poems, Rattigan and Pinter plays, etc. (Over thirty years ago I found myself spending a winter’s night as the only guest in a B&B in Scarborough, a huge Victorian house where the landlady was a gentle widow. I remember her showing me the accommodation and commenting that she had many backpackers staying in summer, and that she regretted not travelling when she was younger; as she spoke, snow began to fall past the bedroom window. That encounter struck me as the quintessential British bed and breakfast experience.)
Anyway, here is Peter Ackroyd on the subject. He too is invoking the drabness of small Victorian or Edwardian hotels, but the melancholy of the temporary resident in the metropolis is nicely evoked: ‘London has always been the abode of strange and solitary people who close their doors upon their own secrets in the middle of the populous city; it has always been the home of ‘lodgings’ , where the shabby and the transient can find a small room with a stained table and a narrow bed’. (London the Biography).
I wouldn’t wish anyone to think that Tim is in any way strange or shabby; but five pictures of anonymous hotel rooms amount to a working week’s worth of hell.
All pictures © Tim Hadrian Marshall 2005.
A Quiet Pint On Massacre Street.
Posted: May 31, 2016 Filed under: Class, Crime and Punishment, Dereliction, Interiors, London Types, Pubs, Tall Tales | Tags: London pubs, south London boozers Comments Off on A Quiet Pint On Massacre Street.
View from the saloon, south London, 2016. © David Secombe.
Recently overheard in a south London pub:
Have one, come on, have one. Look, I’m celebrating, I was acquitted. This afternoon, yeah. Before lunch I’d been in the witness box and they were jumping all over me, I didn’t land a blow. Felt like a right wanker. And I was looking at doing four years. I was up before this judge who was an MP – yeah, an MP, stuck up git, probably a nonce, he’ll be up in court himself next week. I tell you who he looked like, Pluto – Pluto the dog. Did you see my barrister? She was all right, nice looking she was. Put her hand on my arm she did. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, after lunch the jury was ready to come in and everything and then the prosecution said the CCTV didn’t work. That’s their case dead in the water. So I was acquitted. [looks at racing on pub TV] My jockey’s an idiot – look at that div, looks like his bollocks haven’t dropped. Looks like a rent boy. Anyway, thrown out it was, it was thrown out, the fucking CCTV didn’t work. I’m thinking of compensation. Go after them I will, yeah. I’ve got letters about my loss of hearing. Here, I’m selling this phone. It’s fucking immaculate, no scratches on it or nothing, I mean I did manage to drop it in the slop bucket behind the bar, but you’d never tell. Where is this cunt anyway?
Boarded-up pub, Bermondsey, 2010. © David Secombe.
See also: A Fragment of Bar Life.
The Empty Office (for Peter Marlow).
Posted: March 11, 2016 Filed under: Interiors, Transport, Vanishings | Tags: Katy Evans-Bush, Peter Marlow Comments Off on The Empty Office (for Peter Marlow).
Empty Office, Clerkenwell, 2002. Photo © Peter Marlow.
Katy Evans-Bush:
The office as its redundant workers move out is spotted with relics of human degradation: that is, of the letdown from future perfect to mere life.
The screw stuck in the wall, reminder of that award for the old campaign that no one still here now remembers – although it was great work and targets were exceeded – surrounded by nails that hold their heads proud, knowing they held up the proofs of its successes.
Comfortable tea stains, paper clips wedged where the desk didn’t quite meet the wall, a blotched photo of Sarah who worked here half a decade ago, with a small child; she’d be wanting that back, if anyone knew where to find her now. Bits of phone chargers. A chocolate egg in foil. A bit of silk ribbon, some one-legged scissors, a dusty old bottle of Bristol Cream: why is it blue? Are they really that colour? A sad pile of paperbacks no one will ever read: Windows for Dummies and guides to blogging for businesses. Blu-Tack smears where no one thought they’d matter. Sticker-marks on the phones, where someone put the new supplier’s number. Dirt on the sills from the plants the receptionist had to water, because optimism always wins out. Optimism and sheer daily labour.
Things can’t stay clean forever. People are people and every negotiation will be tarnished. Its spreading spots will eat at your blind belief in silver and grey and the functional streamline that bypasses doubt and loops back to the bank, via mobile phones, and suits with reinforced shoulders, and platinum cardholders.
Forget your cheap tiles screaming masculine thrust from the Carpetland down on the roundabout. This office was made for pink fluffy sweaters, cake crumbs, to-do lists, pictures of cats, the darkening water in a vase, nail files and overstuffed folders.
… this is a reprise of one of The London Column’s early posts, from June 2011, in tribute to the English photographer Peter Marlow who died last month.
See also: Point of Interest (2), Point of Interest (3).
The London Column 
