Open Frequency, Axis, March 2009

In 'Bird Gesture' (2008) a woman stands in the centre of a busy shopping precinct. Around her are the signs of urban conformity and consumerism. The sun casts a shadow from one of the nearby trees, one of only a few in this non-place, which could be just about anywhere in the UK. In her cupped hands she holds a tiny bird. The bird is dead, the woman is still; her face down cast as if observing a moment's silence for the death she holds. Meanwhile, a man with a bag of shopping stops and stares observing this natural death in an unnatural world.

'Bird Gesture' is one of a series of new and recent works from Thomas, whose practice combines documented performance, digital video, sonic works, drawing and sculpture. Much of Thomas' work to date has been concerned with her relationship to the environment and to themes from mythological creation stories, and contemporary environmental issues. These issues are examined in a number of ways, not least through Thomas' involvement with the Swansea-based artists' collective 'Framework'. Her newest work (most of which was developed during her recently completed MA in Fine Art at Swansea Metropolitan University), uses documented performance and video to play with the slowing down of time to create quiet gestured moments, which are often subverted by powerful interruptions of sound. She uses her self as the subject, questioning her relationship to the world around her through metonymy and metaphor, and with her new works she extends this relationship to the animal world - specifically the avian. 'Language of The Birds' (2008) and 'Meeting' (2008) are two other pieces from this recent series, which could be paraphrased by Thomas' own expression as exploring 'the non-human in me'. These quiet, understated video performances speak volumes about the relationship between human and non-human worlds, and the fragility of that relationship. Climate change is already having a measurable and detrimental impact on bird populations and migration patterns worldwide, and Thomas' new works are a stark reminder of how non-human species are held hostage to human greed.

2009 celebrates the 150 years since Darwin published his controversial 'On the Origin of Species' (1859), and Thomas' practice connects deeply with the thinking of scientists such as Richard Dawkins who is keen to remind us of the essential link between animal and human. In this respect, Thomas' exploration of the 'non-human in me' could not have been better timed.

Karen Ingham, September 2008

www.axisweb.org/ofSARF.aspx?SELECTIONID=19467





War and Peace 07

Stroud Subscription Rooms
20 June

Reviewed by: Colin Glen

Conflict has been on my mind a lot recently. Even in the chip shop getting my kids meals just before Fiona Kam Meadley’s screening of films on the theme of conflict and conciliation, I couldn’t help overhearing the details of a domestic fight: “..and then she grabbed a scalpel and stabbed him in the arm!..”.

Overheard conversations in the builders’ merchant, the café and on the street also seemed to point to a level of debate about how and why violence occurs. The problem is that we just don’t know.

Down in the little back café of Stroud’s Subscription Rooms – transformed for the night into a cinema – I read in the programme that the ‘War and Peace’ event was aimed specifically at bringing such issues to the fore and to create an environment not only for reflection and discussion, but also in the hope of finding ways to “construct peace”. The beautifully curated evening’s screenings took as a starting point the question posed to Kam Meadley by her eight-year-old son; “Why do people fight?”, to which she had no answer. So she made the documentary Testimony from Liberia with her husband, John Meadley, a development worker in war-scarred regions. The footage consists of one woman’s account of her journey as a hostage at the hands of the rebel militia, along with scores of orphaned children. At the end of the documentary there is a poignant moment as, from behind the camera, John Meadley tentatively approaches the Malaysian UN peacekeeping soldiers and strikes up a conversation on the subject of cricket. His trepidation underlined the fact that UN soldiers still need to be trained to kill to be able to defend peace, raising the issue that conflict can be seen as defence, the protection of territory, either land, power, religious or even, in the ‘War and Peace’ session’s context of the Site07 festival, value systems that surround the artwork. An image flashed into my mind of the previous year’s ‘War and Peace’ event as part of Site06, when the collective read out The Bill of Human Rights at the 17th Century Quaker Meeting House in the small south Cotswold town of Nailsworth.

The attempt to see into the mind of the soldier was also the subject of two films that introduced the evening. Army by Louise Burston presents an archive of personal photographs of Second World War soldiers from Northern Greece. The display of youthful confidence shown in gestures like sitting astride an anti-tank gun, fades into a melancholic, almost naïve display of hope which also speaks of friendship and camaraderie of war. Sean Taylor’s 100 Paces shows the other side of the soldier; the relentless drilling, the ‘square bashing’ that one ex-soldier in the ‘War and Peace’ audience said was designed to eradicate the question “Why?”, a question for which he had been court marshalled three times. Taylor’s piece is a sophisticated study which, in choreographing the soldiers into drill routines whilst singing songs based on the Irish national anthem and UN peacekeeping missions, reveals how interwoven beliefs systems such as nationality and folklore are forming the ideology of a soldier; The ultimate manifestation of these beliefs is that the body can be trained to be a tool of destruction.

Fern Thomas’s Creation Stories, a series of unflinching physical gestures made direct to camera, echoed early performance work such as that of Bruce Nauman or Robert Morris, and yet powerfully portrayed the inseparable union between violence and creativity in basic actions of body. The slowed down footage of clapping hands, dropping a rock or throwing mud at the wall, all pretty innocuous acts in themselves, provoked horror and rapt fascination as slowing down the footage made each act sound like an explosion. The final metaphorical gesture of blowing flour from cupped hands at the camera was particularly successful, as the thundering sound was accompanied by a visual explosion ominously reminiscent of the white-out of a nuclear blast. This dovetailed seamlessly with Fern Thomas’s 00:00:45, a series of flashed-up negative stills taken by a Japanese soldier in the months after the devastation at Hiroshima, forty-five seconds being the time it took for the atomic bomb ‘Little Boy’ to detonate.

Cabinet, a film by Tim Shore is a superbly crafted conceptual musing on the intellectual mindset of the American ‘Unabomber’ Theodore John Kaczynki, who had his manifesto against technological civilisation published in the Washington Post in 1995. The letter-bomber had retreated to the idyllic wilderness of Montana to advance his campaign. The film provoked an interesting discussion after the ‘War and Peace’ event which began with the painter Carolyn White saying that peace was not portrayed as much as war. The chief executive of Peace Direct, Carolyn Hayman, replied with another question; what constitutes an image of peace? Filmmaker Louisa Fairclough suggested that process-based art was more suited to representing peace activity than symbolic still images. As the discussion continued, my mind drifted back to the landscape paintings that I had seen a couple of days previously in Kel Portman’s ‘Walking the Land’ exhibition in the town centre. So many artists move to rural locations to be absorbed by them, to find a sense of peace in nature, Yet as Dominic Thomas’ incisive piece in the exhibition, Untitled (Land/Money/Power) displayed, landscape is a contested place. His simple labelling of three of Britain’s largest country estates as artworks (title, medium, dimensions, price) made me look at the assortment of landscape images with which he shared company, begging the question; who owns that land in that picture?

I was to come across another work by Thomas a few days after ‘War and Peace’, at Louisa Fairclough’s ‘Place Memory’ screenings held at the recently refurbished Stroud Valleys Artspace. With haunting echoes of Tim Shore’s Cabinet, Retreat explores the desire to return to an innocent past in an innocent nature. We follow Thomas as hikes awkwardly through the romantic countryside of the Lake District towards a tumbledown cottage where he spent holidays as a child. Thomas barely enters the cottage before retracing his steps, this time walking backwards. It gradually dawns that the journey we saw of him going up the hill was achieved by reversing original footage of him walking backwards down the hill. The work is a complex and masterful illumination on the hope of finding peace through travel, in both one’s memory to a place of the past and literally, absorbed into a landscape bereft of people.

It was however, the travelling in hope to a populated place, portrayed by Claire Fowler’s documentary Jamal’s Journey, which I found the most thought provoking work in the ‘War and Peace’ programme. The audience was led through the contested territory of the Middle East on the tortuous journey of a nine-month-old little boy from West Bank Palestine to a life saving operation in a Jerusalem hospital. The audience audibly held their collective breath when a power cut interrupted heart surgery operation. Only the calm voice of the doctor punctuated the darkness both of the hospital the space on screen and in the little room at the Sub Rooms, reassuring that the operation could continue if a torch could be found. Thankfully the electricity returned, the operation was a success and Jamal returned home to the palpable relief of his family. Palpable relief was also the feeling here at ‘War and Peace’. In fact the collective experience of the journey of hope proved to be the result of the environment created for the screenings, evidence of the fact that peace is something that has to be constructed, made out of communication.

War and Peace 07 toured to Watershed/Arnolfini cinema, Bristol, 25 July, The Big Green Gathering, Somerset, 1-5 August and continues to Bath Film Festival, November

Writer detail:
Colin Glen
www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/366905

First published: a-n Magazine August 2007






Performing The Crowd

by Zoë Shearman

Leo Tolstoy’s epic historical novel, War and Peace, tells the story of Russian society at the time of the war against Napoleon. As events proceed, the onward roll of history determines happiness and tragedy alike. The later parts of the novel increasingly contain controversial, nonfictional essays about the nature of war, political power, history and historiography. Tolstoy interspersed these essays into the story in a way which defies conventional fiction so that the theme of war is subordinate to the author’s optimistic belief in human existence, but ultimately the novel concludes that there is a minimum of free choice; all is ruled by a relentless historical determinism.

The artists’ films and documentaries included in this screening programme explore, in different cultural contexts, links between violence, conflict and conciliation, and its inscription into the body, memory and habit.

They reflect on the ways in which society and state appropriates bodies,
such as through the military drilling of Sean Taylor’s 100 Paces; a tour-de-force of choreographed army marching, singing and drilling, on which the artist worked collaboratively over a five month period with 56 Irish soldiers at the Collins Barracks in Ireland. The choral work is a complex re-working of sound, including Irish folk songs, military tunes, and the whistles used as signals by drilling soldiers. Drilling comes from the old tradition of formation combat, in which ‘civilised’ soldiers were held in strict formations to maintain an advantage over less organised combatants. 100 Paces reflects on the nature of military control in war and ‘peacetime’, in the contexts of the history and architecture of Collins Barracks in Dublin, to produce a performance work which is as much homage to its participants as critique of drilling’s embodiment of gender and society.

Many of the films reflect on the ways in which the ideology of conflict and war is physically embodied and, thus, institutionalised. Louise Burston’s Army is a powerful and melancholic re-presentation of a series of archive photographs of soldiers, which re-presents the different histories of war, comradeship and loss.

The documentary framework of Ronnie Close’s A Hard Place and Archive 2 reflects on the narrative construction of history in Northern Ireland. A Hard Place involves interviews with Republican and Loyalist ex-hunger strikers, which reveal that personal loyalties rather than grand political ideologies were their over-riding motivation. In Archive 2, footage of the crowd massed to show support at a Republican funeral, including Islamic clergy, shows the way in which violent actions become mythologized into the public imagination and collective identity.

In 00:00:45:00, Angelo Picozzi re-presents negative archive film of the photographs of a soldier’s journey through Japan, and his domestic life, including images of Hiroshima a few months after the nuclear weapon directly killed an estimated 80,000 people. The loop takes 45 seconds, the time it took for the atom bomb, Little Boy, to detonate after being dropped.

Tim Shore’s Cabinet, a complex and multi-layered film shot in Montana and Wyoming, uses the American Unabomber’s Manifesto as its subject. Archival Movietone footage and a soundtrack including 1960's typing lessons, Shaker song, birdsong and an Edison cylinder recording of ‘O Tannenbaum’ evokes the chasm between the Manifesto, a rational critique of technological civilisation, and the violence of the way Kaczynski set about disseminating it.

Archive material is used in a number of the works, and performance is a recurrent theme, as in Creation Stories, by Fern Thomas. In slowing down a series of performative gestures which can be seen as metaphors for violent acts, as though ‘sculpting’ with time, Thomas explores the relationship between violence and creation, producing a slow motion video; a kind of temporal magnifying glass, in which we are aware of the artist becoming object within her own work.

The scars of conflict are contrasted with conciliation, and the resilience of human existence, as in the documentaries of Claire Fowler and Fiona Kam Meadley. Meadley’s Testimony from Liberia reflects on the personal experiences, and struggle, of people to re-build Africa’s oldest Republic after a civil war in which around 250,000 people were killed. Colonised by freed African-American slaves in the 1800s, and dominated by the minority Americo-Liberians until the 1980 coup, Liberia is a nation defined according to Western criteria, in which modern conflicts are symptomatic of underlying historical contradictions, and the UN Peacekeeping forces maintain some 15,000 soldiers.

Jamal’s Journey, by Claire Fowler, follows Iham and Jihad from their home in the Palestinian West Bank, through Israeli checkpoints, to Makassed hospital in Jerusalem, to take their sick son Jamal to be seen by a visiting British surgeon. This emotional ‘rite of passage’ highlights the plight of the struggling Palestinian health care system under occupation.

Like Tolstoy, the artists reflect on the way in which violence in war and peace is embodied and institutionalised, exploring the dialectic between body and society as mediated through conflict but also conciliation.

Zoë Shearman, May 2007

www.war-and-peace.info/