Tag: refugee

Categories
art

Oil quilt in progress

Oil quilt, detail, 60 x 40 cm

Most of the work for this quilt was complete months ago but current events are spurring me to finish. I’m mainly adding borders at the moment but there will be more work after that, pens and stitch and some discharge paste to remove colour in a few places. It can be hard to know when to stop! The original poem was written long ago, it’s on this site in artist’s book form.

Anti-art was a term adopted by the COBRA group of artists who formed in Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam in 1945, as WW2 in Europe ended, a reaction to the horrors just experienced. Some of their work is at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam, well worth a visit if you are in that great city, I found it inspiring. The label anti-art for works that end up in art galleries is a good place to start a discussion about what is art (yawn) because as soon as a gallery is involved or the works are sold then it must become art of some sort. Perhaps if they had kept the work to themselves the group would have been labelled as producers of Art Brut, a form which doesn’t seek public approval or sales, generally.

There is a documentary currently (October 2023) on BBC iPlayer about the Dada movement, closely associated with anti-art.

Categories
Blog

Fortress Europa

The endless waffle and panic about Brexit often seems to hide the on-going horrors of Fortress Europe.  The U.N refugee agency, UNHCR says that,  “..an unprecedented 65.6 million people (worldwide) were uprooted from their homes by conflict and persecution at the end of 2016,” and that “the rate at which solutions are being found for refugees and internally displaced people has been on a falling trend since the end of the Cold War.”  Many of these people are victims of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, as is well understood.  The destruction of Libya by NATO during it’s seven month bombing campaign in 2011 is much less  known or discussed, NATO refuses to acknowledge any civilian casualties from that 60,000 air sortie attack, which they claimed was, “The most successful NATO campaign in history”, a piece of hubris long since removed from their web site.

Fortress Europe free poster 2014

Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy are all major exporters of weapons and this is a growing trend throughout the 21stC.  Weapons sales rise, refugees rise.  Economic factors also massively impact, when the western world catches cold as in the 2008 crash the developing world gets pneumonia.

With the USA ramping up it’s armed forces in Africa, especially in Niger (one of the world’s poorest countries) we can expect more conflict and ever more refugees.  The current business-as-usual attitudes need to be challenged.

Categories
textiles

Welcome to Fukushima

This was my final piece for the MA Multi-Disciplinary Printmaking an it is currently half on display at the Royal West of England gallery as part of their annual open exhibition.  I say half because although I submitted it as a sculpture and wanted it shown in the whole it has been placed against a black curtain.  Still we do what we can and endure what we must.

Welcome to Fukushima – kimono rear mixed printed and embellished fabric, 2m x 2m, 2018
Welcome to Fukushima – kimono front, mixed fabric printed and embellished, 2m x 2m, 2018.

The work references Japanese Boro coats, hand-me-downs that were patched repeatedly and passed on to succeeding generations.  In the later half of the 20thC they became collectable and examples can be found in museums and galleries, such as Sri, prices on application!  Interestingly the V & A gallery in London has a, ‘Make your own: Japanese ‘Boro’ bag‘ .pdf instruction.

There are many examples of Boro on pinterest, and some excellent information courtesy of Heddels.