The Dance of People and the Natural World, The Fourth Wall, Ink
VICTORIA KINGHAM takes in three new exhibitions at Hastings Contemporary
Nengi Omuku is an engaging character and there is great warmth and vibrancy about her works now on exhibition at Hastings Contemporary. Her love of nature (her mother is a horticulturist) is showcased in these ten or so large pieces, and provides her with a “sense of safety and serenity”. The viewing experience itself is augmented by growing plants in each room, and made even more inviting by the addition of scatter cushions and stools.
AFRICAN LANDSCAPES
Nengi Omuku
The works are big, bold, daring hangings in Omuku’s distinctive style, which involves applying paint to gesso-prepared composite strips of a traditional Nigerian fabric called sanyan. It’s tightly-woven and hand-spun, and as a vintage artefact is an important aspect of Nigeria’s cultural history. Most of the cloth advertised as ‘African’ is actually wax print from the Netherlands, thus carrying with it a colonial overlay. Sanyan is wild silk, obtained from the cocoons of the Anaphe moth. Omuku sourced complete garments in the markets of her hometown, Lagos, and transformed them into flat cloth through deconstruction, reversal, and re-stitching, into a kind of tapestry on which to paint.
It could be said that the works depict people in landscapes: in fact they depict people as landscape, and it is sometimes difficult to see where one starts and the other begins. So for example Repose shows two women seated within a brown earth landscape: their faces are intentionally undefined, their dresses vivid green, the pose monumental. The earth, the figures, the cloth, combine to make something that stands as a historical statement, emanating from the purposely ‘unfinished’ style, the materials, the installation, and the intent.
THE FOURTH WALL
The work of Roland Hicks is equally striking but (at least at first glance) could not be more of a contrast to that of Omuku. He will be Artist in Residence at the Contemporary for the next two weeks; he will create a new work while he is there in the studio.
Hicks’ work is extraordinary and unique. He has won a well-deserved number of prizes and, besides his personal talent for line, he makes the act of drawing into a performance in itself. In the particular space of the gallery, looking out to the sea through the little crowd of fisherman’s huts and boats, he has constructed something that looks as though it is made of old planks from the net stores. Closer examination reveals drawing – the wood grain and the guano are drawn and painted on. Another wall of the gallery appears to be constructed from old doors, offcuts, found objects, rust, staples – it’s trompe l’oeil, but with a contemporary recycling message. Even the rust is staged. Staging is inherent in the title of the exhibition: the ‘fourth wall’ traditionally means the conceptual barrier between any performance and its audience. There is also a real fourth wall on which Hicks has drawn, with extraordinary skill, something which looks like a temporary wall made up of odd doors and planks and MDF boards, stapled roughly in all directions. And indeed, it is a temporary wall – he says it’s the biggest drawing he’s ever done, but it will be discarded after the end of his exhibition.
This is unclassifiable art; it inter-relates many boundaries and within each technique there is purpose. It is drawing playing at sculpture and sculpture playing at performance and, at the end of the residency, the performance will be finished, the audience will go home, and the space will again be empty, ready for re-use. “All illusionistic art involves some kind of deception. These walls will effectively be built from misinformation and misdirection.” This is British conceptual art at its best.
INK
Sir Quentin Blake is ninety years old; his drawing style is etched into the consciousness of any parent or child from the 1970s on, whose favourite books were those of Roald Dahl, Russell Hoban, or Michael Rosen. Through his pen the characters of Matilda, Fantastic Mr Fox, James and the Giant Peach, and the Big Friendly Giant have been immortalised. More up-to-date legends are David Walliams’ Mr. Stink and Blake’s own Mrs Armitage, Queen of the Road. Two walls of the large gallery in the Contemporary are hung with lines of instantly-recognisable small framed pen-and-ink drawings of familiar-looking figures in odd clothes, sometimes on whimsical bicycles, surrounded by crows and vultures or carrying them on a specially-constructed frame.
The nonagenarian is still drawing. From his bed he has made the drawings on the third wall: a series of about thirty faces culled from his imagination, as large and as lively as anything else he has produced over the years. He is an illustrator of genius with a style that is unforgettable. He is known as a cartoonist but given the perfection of each small work, full character captured at great speed, his work must surely cross into the territory of great art.
Ambiguity and crossover, therefore, are apparent in all three of these exhibitions, which will be at the Contemporary for the next six months. Their happy juxtaposition is the brainchild of gallery Director and curator, Liz Gilmore, who has maintained a consistently high quality of exhibitions since her appointment in 2010, when the gallery was still the Jerwood. The residents of the local area are fortunate to have such a great resource.
The Dance of People and the Natural World and The Fourth Wall can be seen at Hastings Contemporary until 3 March 2024. Ink is showing until 12 November. For more details see hastingscontemporary.org/event-category/exhibitions/.
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