A Sense of Occasion

A Sense of Occasion, an essay by Julia Ellis

Imagine: a bird’s eye view of all of the objects which could tell the story of the history of the world. Multitudes of objects: different forms, colours and materials; objects from across the continents, revealing different histories and made for different occasions. The preparation, presentation and use of objects is, and always has been, deeply connected with special occasions: from private to public, from rites of passage to religious ceremonies and civic functions.

A Sense of Occasion has asked the question- How can contemporary material culture most creatively define our sense of who we are in Britain at the start of the twenty first century? The multi-racial, multi-religious or secular, multi-cultural us and all the diversity and complexity of our collective identities? Here the exhibition is concerned as much with exploring ideas and attitudes to contemporary celebratory processes in relation to the making of art, as it is with presenting new and functional objects for the reinterpretation of traditional occasions and for servicing emergent  rituals or customs.

The following themes or categories have emerged from comparing the selected exhibition proposals; to a large extent these are subjective divisions providing but one of many possible critical frameworks for looking  at the work. Across these categories there is a further distinction which should be addressed: works which are inspired by (external) occasions in contrast with those which reveal the artist as the celebrant of internal ideas and rituals. In whichever way we choose to present or interpret them, these works offer us important clues to our condition.

Memory

Occasions are inseparable from our actual or projected memories of them. Whereas regular seasonal festivities can blur into oneness, we are capable of recollecting special memories in almost hallucinatory detail. The giving and presentation of objects is an ongoing part of the process linking occasions with our memories of them. Richard Slee’s Bouquet was made in reponse to the perception of the giving of flowers as an increasingly potent symbol of collective memory. Slee’s concern is also with the power of the bouquet to be, jointly, a token of celebration and an expression of grief. Lustred ceramic equivalents of real flowers, the heads of these plump blooms of soft clay seem to sag under their own weight, signalling their ripe fragility.

Images: Bouquet by Richard Slee.  Debris by Helmert Robbertsen. Photos: Richard Battye.

Helmert Robbertsen describes silver as a material with a special emotional power and enduring quality which invests the most basic of forms and transcends individual memories. Like Slee’s Bouquet  his Debris also juxtaposes the temporary with the permanent. A simple silver ceremonial object, the bowl rests on a column of blocks made from albums of photographs which Robbertsen has torn, pulped and reformed. The vessel so replaces photographic images as a trigger for memory, possessing a meaning and permanence transcending the day to day ephemera of modern life.

Although Slee and Robbertsen are concerned here with abstract and impersonal relationships between objects and memory, both are also dealing with issues of collective response. In contrast, the collective is combined with the personal in Sam Pickard’s To Those I Have Loved, a textile banner reminiscent of Aids Quilts, new objects produced in Britain in the 1980s to meet a collective need of the gay community to create personal memorials to those who had died. This banner is the largest piece in Pickard’s ongoing series of works and fashion accessories exploring relationships between poetry, colour and the tactile values of textiles. Its monumentality, although partly to do with its actual scale, is heightened by the surety of its technical accomplishment and a controlled, symbolic use of the colour pink which adds to the poignancy of the work.

Images: To Those I Have Loved by Sam Pickard. Photo: Richard Battye. Memoria by Lin Cheung. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Personal response is taken further in Lin Cheung’s Memoria mourning jewellery, made from the myriad of earring scrolls found by Cheung whilst sorting her Mother’s belongings after her death. Whilst the occasion for the making of these pieces was here a deeply personal one, Cheung has subsequently continued to produce ranges of new jewellery forms from quantities of these scrolls, inspired by the technique, if not by the occasion of the original Memoria mourning jewellery pieces.

Rites of Passage

Associations between objects, memories and occasions can be reinforced by the transformation of existing objects which have already had a life of use. In the last five years Mah Rana has worked with second-hand wedding rings.  The title of Rana’s ring Forever and Always (again) is a playfully ironic comment on marriage. This is reinforced in making the piece from two second hand wedding rings, melted down, reformed and then polished to be as new. The form of the ring confirms the message of the title: its stone is a blown glass dome housing a ‘snowstorm’ of gold filings or ‘shifting sands.’

Images: Forever and Always (again) by Mah Rana. Photo: Richard Battye. The Brides Clothes (detail) by Lucy Brown. Photo: Rob Curtis.

Rana’s concern is with the generic nature of rings as anonymous items ripe for formal and conceptual change.  In comparison, textile artist Lucy Brown is interested in the humanness embedded in clothing and the way it holds the visual memories of the person who once wore it. Brown, who remembers dressing up in her mother’s and grandmother’s wedding dresses, disassembles second- hand  clothes to weave them into (unwearable) hanging, garment forms. The Brides’ Clothes, commissioned  by Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham, was woven from nine second-hand wedding dresses and a wedding sari presented to the gallery by women from local communities. In its installation setting with full-length mirror, it offers everyone the opportunity to be a bride, to ‘wear’ the dress and so observe themselves adorned and imbued with the legacy and emotional investment of ten wedding days, fused into a single woven cloth.

Images: Birthwake by Henny Burnett. Photo: Mark Sidebottom. Cot Blanket by Jutta Stahlhacke. Photo: Richard Battye.

Birthwake by Henny Burnett and Jutta Stahlhacke’s Cot Blankets are in different ways concerned with  historical documentation  and cultural mythologies surrounding birth. Both investigate the act of wrapping as a metaphor for comfort and protection. Whereas the Cot Blankets are ultimately practical and functional, Birthwake is an archaeological conceit, linking the processes of birth and death in one piece,  using distressed muslin as a base for the work, readable either as swaddling cloth or  shroud.  Conversely, Lin Cheung’s Birth-tag, a concept developed as an iconic image for the publicity of this exhibition, is a sensitive, witty transformation of the plastic tag which identifies all hospital-born babies, so providing the first piece of jewellery for many of us.

Identity

Traditions of clothing are culturally interwoven with special occasions and different cultures have diverse ways of reinforcing the significance of dress. In a Yoruba (Nigerian) tradition, aso-ebe, a family group or set of friends commission garments made from the same cloth for maximum visual impact as a collective expression of solidarity in response to a special event.  A recent trend in the business community has been the adoption of an informal dress code, replacing the corporate message of the city suit with the personal and the individual.  Heather Belcher’s Folding and Unfolding comment on the social and symbolic meaning of the shirt and play with its form. Made from hand-rolled felt, at points bonded together, these dysfunctional parodies of crisp starched garments deny the rituals of unpinning and unfolding for a special occasion. In their suspended, ambiguous states of closed, open, folding, unfolding, they comment and potentially mock the symbolic power of the shirt and its duality of meaning: formality and respectability versus concealment of the inner person.

 Images: Folding by Heather Belcher. Photo: Richard Battye. Claire’s Coming Out Dress by Grayson Perry. Photo: Rob Weiss.

The representation of clothing in contemporary textile art is often preoccupied with human identity and both Heather Belcher and Lucy Brown explore the concept of clothing as a second skin. Brown’s work has included a series of woven garments made to reflect the private and the public individual. In Grayson Perry’s Claire’s Coming Out Dress this is also a central issue, relating specifically to Perry’s own transvestite identity, Claire. The dress and Perry’s wearing of it at a celebratory coming out party is at once a personal expression of identity and a symbol of the innocence and vulnerability of all transvestites, (whether heterosexual or homosexual), whose cross-dressing preferences reveal a psychological division between the masculine and feminine self. The traditional style of the dress intentionally places it, not within the realms of fashion or overt or predatory sexuality, but within a story book world of girls – from Alice to The Wizard of Oz.  Seen from a distance, the dress is entirely this: a sumptuous confection of colour and design. On closer inspection, innocuous pattern becomes disquieting image, a celebration of both positive and negative which acknowledges the tricky road to acceptance.

The occasion of ‘coming out’ as an affirmation and assertion of cultural identity, is celebrated both individually and collectively.  In contemporary Britain, gay and lesbian Pride marches, parades or processions have become an annual event and are regarded as special occasions. The inclusion of colourful and extravagant Head-dresses made and worn as part of Mass Camp for Birmingham Pride 2000, illustrates the kinds of ephemeral costumes created for this special occasion.   

 Images: Head-dresses by Mass Camp. Photo: Ming de Nasty. Brit Flag by Sokari Douglas Camp. Photo: Richard Battye.

Sokari Douglas Camp also combines issues of personal with collective identity. In Brit Flag, two black athletes stand together holding the Union Jack. Here the occasion is unspecified but the image has recently been paralleled in the press photographs of Black gold medalists at this year’s  Sydney Olympics. Potent, emotional symbols at public occasions, flags intensify our sense of national pride. Douglas Camp’s depiction of the British flag is an uneasy one; Brit Flag is an allegory which questions perceptions of black people in Britain and cites the need for  acknowledging the diversity of black cultural heritage. Within ‘celebration’ also lies warning:  celebrate the achievements of Black British people in the fervour and heightened emotion of occasions of national pride, but not at the cost of ignoring the realities of the bigger picture.

Celebrant Suit (Beta) by Simon Lewandowski brings to mind a low-tech ancestral robot with physical countenance reduced to a form of gruesome skin. The cultural antecedents of the suit are Nigerian masquerade costumes and Parangoles – wearable Brazilian artworks. The suit has a spirit of mock-ethnicity, it is machine-knitted and a repository for electronic gadgetry.  As such, it is also an ironic ‘precursor’ of developments  at the cutting edge of product/fashion design; those cyborg-style  garments -of- the- future incorporating ‘wearable’ computers and mobile phones. Made as a multiple, the suit imparts a cynical message with respect to occasions, proposing the possibility of a pre-ordained mechanism for every celebration opportunity.

 Images: Celebrant Suit (detail) by Simon Lewandowski. Photo courtesy of the artist. A New Communion by Maria Hanson. Photo: Richard Battye.

Worship

Religious objects, made for established rituals of worship are perhaps the least likely to adopt change, their form and use being integral to religious observance. Commissioned by Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Marian Hanson’s A New Communion proposes a new formal iconography for objects used in Holy Communion, heightening a sense of Christian unity. Opportunities for new religious objects are potentially greater in the context of those faiths in Britain which can be described as emergent with respect to the growth of  their practice in this country. Lubna Chowdhary’s House of Days is an innovative object for Muslim religion, a shrine for domestic use, whereas Elza Tantcheva’s woven textile Horugva  incorporates the colour and symbolism of the Eastern Orthodox church. Horugva possesses a function and meaning which, whilst potentially applicable to ecclesiastical settings, is firmly rooted in contemporary art practice.

 Images: House of Days by Lubna Chowdhary. Photos: Richard Battye. Horugva by Elza Tantcheva. Photos: Richard Battye.

Andy Hazell’s Shrine To The Freedom from Dusting pays homage to secularism in its worship of the everyday ritual of housework. The shrine provokes contemplation with respect to this activity. In contrast, David Petts’ Greetings Pole provides an object for use in real, secular events: an adaptable and transformable object for diverse occasions of communal greeting. Vanetta Mala Seecharran’s Mala, made in silver for her parents, is  concerned with the process of greeting in a family context; it is derived from the Hindu mala, a flower garland which is both a sign of welcome and a token of respect.

Images: Mala by Vanetta Mala Seecharan.  A Shrine to the Freedom From Dusting by Andy Hazell. Photos: Richard Battye.

Images: Spirit Comforters by Julia Ingle. Photos: Richard Battye. The Greetings Pole by David Petts. Photos: Karen Mcdonnell.

Personal secular rituals, spiritual and physical, positive and negative are the focus of Laura Glassar’s Sick Sticks (eating disorder tools), Face Wire, Tape Measure and His and Her scarification tools, and Julia Ingle’s Spirit Comforters. The works deal respectively with issues of body worship and emotional health, which are arguably forms of contemporary cultural obsession paralleling, if not subsuming, traditional religious belief. Whilst Sick Sticks and other works investigates the pre-occupation with body image as one of the most negative aspects of contemporary existence, the Spirit Comforters, as their title announces, are new talismen advocating personal rituals of play to meet human emotional needs. 

Images: Sick Sticks by Laura Glassar. Photos: Richard Battye. Zero 000 by Nina Edge. Photo: courtesy of the artist.

The biggest new year’s eve party of our lifetimes was held on 31st December 1999. However, the celebrations for the millennium seem ultimately to have been merely big, rather than significant, retrospective rather than visionary. While the majority of pieces in this exhibition deal with personal and powerful occasions, two artists bring our ambivalence to this very public moment to the fore through their work. Keith Khan’s costume designs for the central show in the Dome underline the communal and celebratory nature of the Millennium year. His fusing of traditional English folk crafts like smocking, with Caribbean Carnival costume, skateboard design and new sports fabrics, demonstrates how the referencing of a diverse contemporary British culture can create new objects for different types of occasion. On the other hand, Nina Edge’s textile-based Zero series encourages a questioning of the nature of this chronological moment and the validity of such linear measurement. In the end, it is not necessarily such artificial events that form the greatest occasions, but those which we are able to perceive as reflecting and affecting the shaping of our lives.

 

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