Essays
Some words
One of the highlights of a good exhibition are the pieces of writing that come with it. Below are two essays by two wonderful writers, the academic Professor Anita Taylor and the critic Sacha Craddock, both pivotal figures in the Art world.
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Professor Anita Taylor, May 2024
…a gift of drawings to Tarset Despite the title of the residency programme, studying the map for the long journey ahead, and a fairly remote rural upbringing, somehow the final three mile stretch of single-track road to reach Highgreen in Tarset was fairly daunting. The infinity of the graphite grey skies allowing the deep green low-lying moorland to loom into view prompted an immediate invitation to think about drawing as a way to make sense of this vast space and the distant horizon on this singular route to an as yet unknown destination. VARC (Visual Arts in Rural Communities) provides a distinctive residency programme, with Christy Burdock, the latest artist-in-resident charged with the task of responding to the landscape and community over an eight-month period, with Tarset as a site of inspiration and imagination, and of fortuitous encounters. This means finding the locus of connection between the commissioned artist and this experience in whatever way seems resonant in this place where the seasons and the farming year are prevalent features. The opportunity combines the valuable freedom to make art with a deep responsibility to this context. Seven months in, Christy Burdock is in that interesting position of having become immersed in place, process and community, but with an end in sight; a known and forthcoming dislocation. By its nature, a residency sustains an underlying sense of being a stranger at large, regardless of the closeness of working amongst a community and the deep bonds that can be made. The focused and concentrated time in a new place, in a new studio, means that the present is constantly infused with a meta-narrative, a pre-forming memory, and a sense of otherness. There is a clear sense of the seasons and of time passing through this residency, far away from the synthetic hum of a city. The alignment of this new creative cycle with that of the farming year provoked an immediate jolt for Christy Burdock, a London-based artist, as the new beginnings of the residency coincided with a farm visit, the witnessing of a lambing and the visceral, raw reality of life and death in birth, and an immediately apparent precarity. Drawing as a means of observation, documentation, an act of witness, and of storytelling, is critical to Christy’s mode of enquiry and engagement. Here, gathering inspiration by getting to know the rhythms and events of the countryside and community through drawing and talking; and then taking these experiences back to the studio to draw from memory. Her well-tested approach has been to become immersed in place and community to explore the lives of others, and to share that through the ‘gift’ of drawing. Her own life experience underpins a sensitivity to being an ‘incomer’ and, simultaneously, an outsider, driving a keen curiosity to discover other ways of living through direct engagement with new people, contexts and environments, where she aims to create “genuine relationships that are remembered positively when I leave. Giving added value to the community, using my practice.” The adjustment of Christy’s working practice to the country seasons is also apparent. The creeping impact of the weather, the fluctuating moisture of a stone-built studio, has meant a necessary shift to working on small wooden panels rather than on canvas or paper, as these porous supports were far too sensitive to the damp air. The solution of working on these small, often circular, panels with their hard, resistant surfaces has enriched the drawings by lending both a clarity and incisiveness to the drawn graphite marks, and a sense of brittle fragility that somehow forms and finds an equivalence to the experience of being an artist resolutely present in Tarset. The drawings sit as though medallions or plaques amongst hay and wool gathered in the dedicated studio, commemorating meetings and conversations of rural life in the past months: economics, politics, place, and people getting by. These drawings serve as a record, a testament, a glimpse of the encounters and dialogues with new people and places – and form a chronicle of a necessarily meandering journey of generous and generative exploration. As portraits of people and places, these fragments, conjoined by experience and memory, collectively sum up the whole residency and a community; and yet, individually, they share specific, acutely observed moments in lives, and the day-to-day. Other works are more lyrical, inventively and eloquently marking the cyclical nature of the agricultural seasons (with a nod to Stanley Spencer and his exultations of rural village life). A hub for the community, The Holly Bush Inn, has become the place where conversations are struck up and, through the curiosity and kindness of strangers, new subjects are found, new connections made and, for Christy, barriers dissolved. As a place of interchange, a residency affords a two-way mirror for artist and community; providing a lens on life and living, and on the role of an artist in this social context. Here, Christy’s use of drawing, as a means to synthesise these experiences and to think through making and doing, is critical. These drawn dialogues record exchange, make new meaning, and foster new awareness and curiosity through the found stories of Tarset; all made visible through these acts of drawing. A set of Christy’s drawings has come back to the studio for my visit from The Holly Bush Inn, where they provided another kind of conversation point. Their temporary removal has made their absence felt already and, when they return, this cherished exchange will continue beyond the residency… as a gift of drawings for, and of, Tarset. Anita Taylor Anita Taylor is Dean of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design at the University of Dundee. She is the founding Director of the foremost annual drawing exhibition in the UK, the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize [since 1994], and Drawing Projects UK, a public-facing initiative dedicated to drawing [since 2009]. After graduating from MA Painting at the Royal College of Art [1987], she became Artist-in-Residence at Durham Cathedral [1987-88], then Cheltenham Fellow in Painting [1988-89]. She has extensive teaching, research, peer and expert review, and her academic leadership experience includes: Executive Dean of Bath School of Art and Design at Bath Spa University; Director & Chief Executive Officer, National Art School in Sydney, Australia; Dean of Wimbledon College of Art, University of the Arts London [UAL]; Director, The Research Centre for Drawing at UAL; and Vice Principal of Wimbledon School of Art. Panel memberships include: Higher Education Funding Councils of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales Research Assessment Exercise RAE2008, Art & Design Panel; Hong Kong Research Assessment Exercise RAE2014, Creative Arts, Performing Arts & Design Panel; and Research Excellence Framework REF2021, member of Sub-Panel 32 Art & Design: History, Practice and Theory. She is a Trustee and the current Chair of the UK Council for Higher Education in Art and Design, and a Trustee of Stroud Valley Arts. |
Sacha Craddock, August 2020
Christy Burdock’s paintings and drawings manage to merge the specific with the general. Her work plays constantly, as it sweeps between suggestion, expectation and association. The work projects, with taste, touch and the perception of type, the pull back from the representation of a generalized situation, to the painting of an actual portrait. As ‘researcher’ and ‘drawer’, during her visits to the House of Commons, for instance, Burdock loved observing the way journalists interacted with the MPs. A “news and current affairs junkie”, she says she was able to watch their bodies with “a real feel for the way the world is moving around.” So while Burdock’s work can misguidedly be perceived as purely illustrative the artist is also imagined to be innocent by those whom she aims to represent. The resultant imagery, especially that of women who remain hidden, re-enforces the fact that no one is really ever able to recognise themselves. A dangerous ability to embody something through perception, touch, and understanding, is seldom considered in advance. Burdock’s recent paintings seem to deal with the flipside of goodness. She is fascinated in part by the way an individual can be held through behaviour, influence and expectation within a group. Sinister but dull, ‘The Puritans’, carry an air about them. They watch as a young woman who is the subject of their apparent good intention is severely undermined. More than passive aggressive, this almost collapsing figure at the front fast becomes as invisible as the artist who may have been called in to observe. When Burdock brings herself to a situation, she cannot help but allude to conditions that shape personal and political trauma. The empty streets and twitching curtains held within layers of diaphanous material merge the incidental with the iconic. A body balloon with sharp dark pupils, is stooping, shifting, and containing an object of attention. Working against the grain the work betrays a certain level of perversity, however. The artist rubs up against the liberal direction of play, in her sympathy for that which is hidden and shuttered. The exhibition Politics, Sex and Religion is different in part because it is made up of painting rather than drawing. Burdock represents here a broad range of preoccupations and experience, rather than that of just one workplace. While institutions must investigate themselves and pay attention to the way they behave, a deadly inability to change hovers nearby. Burdock brings a sense of a metaphorical place to the painting and hopes that something or someone might be liberated. When drawing bordering on caricature stops being drawing, the paint is able to embody an even more palpable atmosphere. The first section of Who has seen the Wind by Christina Rossetti; “Who has seen the wind? Neither I nor you. But where the leaves hang trembling, the wind is passing through” can be seen to allude to the invisible effects of control and behaviour. Despite a desire to leave past work behind, the work is still dependent, to a certain level, on the expectation to reveal this truth beneath the surface. From carrying atmosphere to apparently hiding what you know, a painting is only able to run along beside the complexities of life. So, the opposite to fresh, this distillation of time and experience, carries a purposeful concentration of occurrence within it. The hovering figures remain frozen, virtually rooted in the physical and formal structures of history. Sacha Craddock Sacha Craddock is an independent art critic, writer & curator based in London. Co-founder of ArtSchool Palestine, Craddock is co-founder or the Contemporary Art Award and council member of the Abbey Awards in Painting at the British School at Rome, Trustee of the Shelagh Cluett Trust, and President of the International Association of Art Critics AICA UK, the British section of International Association of Art Critics. She was Chair of the Board of New Contemporaries and selection process from 1996 until December 2021. Her commitment to contemporary art encompasses curating, organizing, promotion, setting up structures, education, critical writing, and creating new networks designed to bring artists and audiences together. Selected critical writing includes essays on Alison Wilding, Laura Ford, Mark Boulos, Benjamin Senior, Angus Fairhurst, Richard Billingham, Jose Dávila, Chantal Joffe, Mustafa Hulusi, Heri Dono, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rosa Lee, Young In, Alberto Savinio and Adam Henein which is part of Misk Art Institute’s the Art Library series. She was the co-founder of Bloomberg Space and its curator from 2002-2011. Her curatorial contribution includes Turner Prize Hull 2017, 'Strike Site' at Backlit Gallery, Nottingham 2018, 'Here, Now' at Misk Art Institute 2021, 'Glossary' for Curated by, Vienna 2023, and 'Thought to Image' for Albion Jeune 2024. Sacha Craddock's present and former practices include:
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