Jo Jo Johnson: Puppet discovered. acrylic and oil on canvas 125x90cm 2023
Glenn Ibbitson is a painter, collage artist, and filmmaker operating in the Western figurative tradition. His works tend to address a range of socio-political issues, carried as subtext below the surface of ostensibly straightforward representation. His work is represented in private and public collections across six continents.
Can you tell me about a significant turning point in your practice?
Everyone deserves one break in their life. Mine came by chance, seeing in the arts listings section of a national newspaper an opportunity to train with the BBC as a scenic artist. I didn’t have the first idea of what this might entail, but I bluffed my way through a panel at Television Centre in London, and thereafter began my perfect apprenticeship—far better for me than any masters degree. It gave me some proper tuition at last, introducing me to a range of time and labour-saving techniques. It made me work against the clock, like any other proper job out there. Above all, it paid a good salary. I also had enough spare time to maintain a connection with my own painting practice, which was being fed constantly by this new experience. In film studios, seemingly surreal juxtapositions became commonplace; gesture and theatricality took [literally] centre stage. Myriad special effects were revealed to me; this was an industry based on <i>smoke and mirrors<i> with everything bathed in either high saturation colour or the subdued tonality of Noir. My work was transformed; it never looked quite the same again.
Does art help you address other areas of your life?
My art tends to bleed into other areas of my life like a watercolour in the rain, to such an extent that there is no longer any definite dividing line between my art practice and my life outside of art. Activities outside the studio include work as a set painter or co-designer in theatre, where, through collaboration with a team of highly talented people, I can still learn on the job. Everything I involve myself with is potential source material for the next painting project, be it a painting, poster, graphic novel, playscript, or film.
What advice do you have for young, aspiring artists?
Artists are pretty poor when it comes to absorbing advice. I know I was, but for what it is worth, here are five recommendations:
First, ignore the solipsistic art market. The art market and I have developed the perfect relationship. I don’t pester it with my product. It ignores me, enabling me to do my own thing. It has been a mutually successful working arrangement over the past four decades.
Second, avoid using artspeak to describe your work. It alienates most of your audience and like Toki Pona, it only allows communication with a limited number of other people on the planet.
Third, resist the lure of art competitions. Art is not a competitive activity. It cannot be subject to comparative judgements. Such competitions are set up by institutions to generate money, and you, as an artist, are their chosen cash cow.
Fourth, find alternative spaces in which to display your work. Pop-up shows held in vacant retail units, within art groups or artist collectives.
Finally, be realistic. Appreciate that it is the journey along your professional timeline that will be your reward, not the hoped-for destination.
What are you working on at the moment?
In accordance with my enthusiasm for film, I have just completed co-curating an international film festival attracting over 80 films from 15 countries, providing a three-day event of short films. Feedback has been such that it is likely to become an annual event.
I currently have six small canvases in progress, part of an ongoing series entitled <i>The Death of Richthofen<i>. My father died nearly twenty years ago. From that moment in 2004, I felt a need to pay tribute to him through my art. I had a vague idea that the composition would be constructed around our days spent making model aircraft together and playing in the local park. After prevaricating for nearly fourteen years, I did three versions, and the current panels are isolated details from these multifigure compositions. More to come, I think. I am also developing a script for a play based on the works of George Orwell. As curator of <i>Room 103<i> I have taken works which interrogate his preoccupations to galleries in Leeds, Manchester, West Wales, and the University of Oxford.
What is the role of an artist in society, and why is it important?
As I see it, the artist’s role is to illuminate and warn. Democracy and personal freedoms are more fragile than we would like to believe, and their preservation requires artists to assume their share of responsibility for their safe preservation. . I hope to direct attention to socio-political issues in a subtle way, allowing a viewer to enjoy a superficial encounter with colour and form within the Western painting tradition, and then to wrong-foot them by gradually revealing a subtext smuggled under that surface, be it trafficking, ecocide, gender politics, corruption, or deception. With the demise of the ‘avant-garde’ in our post-modern period, narrative art is now resurgent, possibly due in part to the recent elevation of the graphic novel to the level of serious cultural medium. This has made my modus operandi less problematic.
Copies of the book NOIR, can be purchased through Etsy using the link:
The inaugural Attic Theatre International Film Festival is organised by the Attic Theatre, a group of actors, film-makers and technicians who are captivated by the medium of film. Our aim is to encourage excellence in film-making and to present the medium of movie to our audiences through a free weekend-long event. We invite submissions from around the world. Newcastle Emlyn serves a wide area across three counties in South West Wales – Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire.
Cawdor Hall Market Square Newcastle Emlyn, Carmarthenshire SA38 9AF United Kingdom
We have an eighty seat auditorium in a grade-2-listed historic building in the centre of town with a full size screen. The official selection for the festival will consist of approximately 40 short films in competition. Screenings will be divided into sessions of 4 to 6 short films. Although award categories have been established, there will be no separation of genre into specific screening sessions. Please email if you have any questions. [see address below]
ATIFF is genre-fluid; romance, horror, action, documentary, noir, art, technology. All welcome.
The Festival Categories: Drama Best Made in Wales Experimental Animation Cinematography Documentary Black & White Music Environmentalist ATiFF award If there is no film that reaches the quality required for the above categories no award will be made. All projects officially selected will receive the Festival’s official laurel and the custom certificate of achievement according to their final status in the competition. All category winners will receive an ATiFF statuette.
Submissions can be handled through FilmFreeway or sent directly to us. E-mail smokingbrush@btinternet.com for details
The event will take place 13th-15th October, 2023
The event is free to the public.
The Festival Directors are:
Melanie Davies, Carole King, Pete Mount, Glenn Ibbitson
A painter, collagist, printmaker, filmmaker, and graphic novelist. Glenn originally studied as a fine art painter and was trained at BBC Television Centre [London] as a scenic painter; producing portraits and backdrops for programs as diverse as Newsnight, Match of the Day, Later with Jools Holland and of course, Blue Peter [though he was never awarded a badge]. Two projects on which he headed the scenic artwork won BAFTA awards for design; [“Portrait of a Marriage” 1989; “Persuasion” 1994]. Theatre and film followed, working on movies directed by Lous Mallé, Bill Forsyth, Henry Jaglom, and Martin Scorcese; these provided opportunities for him to practice trompe-l’oeil techniques and visual trickery on an industrial scale. After fourteen years in the business, Glenn decided to relocate to West Wales to develop his own art full-time, drawing upon his experience to investigate various artistic methods of [mis]representation to produce a visual discord; a blurring of the line between the genuine and the fraudulent, reality and illusion. He has been elected a member of the Royal Watercolour Society of Wales [currently vice-chair]. and associate of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, showing regularly with both societies. The artwork has been shown at venues in [among others,] Cardiff, London, San Francisco, Dortmund, Kyoto, and New York. Films have been shown in Clermont Ferrand, London, Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo. Paintings are lodged in private collections across six continents.
Consignment; batch31 unit 4
Oil on canvas, 61x61cm
Consignment; batch31 unit3
Oil on canvas, 61x61cm
Observational drawing practice underpins all of Glenn’s art. His paintings are a carefully observed synthesis of the general view and the telling detail; the asymmetry of a pair of ears, the pull of flesh between finger and thumb, and the sideways fall of a breast under its own particular weight. His experience as a Scenic Artist highlighted the value of photographic and moving image footage as supplements to studies from life. He uses his art to investigate social issues; “Smoke and Mirrors” addressed political spin, social disenfranchisement, the ecological movement, and feminism. The graphic novel “Eclipse” was inspired by homelessness and the social response it provokes in Japan. ”Consignment” was a response to trafficking/smuggling. “Targets and Barcodes” was a series of visual metaphors for state surveillance and character profiling, However, to refute claims of didacticism, the message is often obscure; embedded only as subtext, under cover of traditional Western painting technique. “I’m not a crusading kind of artist but if something sticks, I have to paint about it. It’s completely intuitive”. He feels able now to follow that gut feeling with no concern for any potential audience or for the commercial viability of the work. His position in relation to the “art world” is one of mutual aversion. “I think the most valuable lesson I’ve learned is that distance from the contemporary art scene is no bad thing. Personally, I have found it liberating. Because I have never had a high profile, I have never needed to serve up a specific product for a particular market, and there has been no obligation to follow trends. This means I have been able to keep my options open at all times. I can step from one project to the next in any medium I choose. I work on things I can believe in, not on work I am obliged to produce. My work has been described as resolutely uncommercial. I will settle for that.”
Target; St. Sebastian
Oil on canvas
75x75cm
1. Where are you from and how does that affect your work?
I am from Leeds in Yorkshire. I would say that where I came from at the time I was growing up, in a city in decline on the edge of a coalfield, is more responsible for my political outlook than my art practice. With forty year’s worth of clear water between that location and now, I no longer think my background has has any bearing on the direction of my work. My influences have always tended towards the universal rather than the parochial. I think this is a natural consequence of the access to information from around the globe through the use of the worldwide web.
The Torrey Canyon ecological disaster and the social crime perpetrated on working people and their children at Aberfan are the two earliest news items I can remember clearly. Together they have subliminally shaped my subsequent world view.
2. What is your background?
My suburban working class family regarded education as essential, though art education may have seemed something of a novelty. I traded my place to read Modern History at St. Andrews to study at Harrogate foundation Hull College of Art. An apprenticeship as a scenic artist at BBC Television Centre served me better than a post-graduate course, as it forced me to appreciate the importance of meeting deadlines -whilst earning a salary.
3. Why did you choose to be an artist?
I don’t think I chose art; rather it crept up on me and caught me by stealth. I suppose painting and drawing had always been a part of my background from those Christmases when I was given the annual pressed-tin watercolour boxes and pen and pencil sets. I never really thought the results were particularly successful, but friends and teachers from school with whom I still have contact remember me as the visual one of our group. Only in my late teens did this background interest push forward to occupy centre stage
4. What inspires you?
Though most artists relocate to West Wales for the inspiration its landscape offers up [it has that St. Ives effect], it is humankind which I respond to. It’s achievements its aspirations, it’s failings, the mess it has made and the need to clean it up. If I were asked to name a few specifically artistic achievements which have inspired me, I would have to include Van Eyck’s ‘Adoration of the Golden Lamb’; Caravaggio’s works which can be found around Rome in the churches for which they were specifically commissioned; Piero’s fresco work around Tuscany; Vermeer’s ‘Woman in Blue Reading a Letter’-a singular depiction of understated emotion and quietude.
5. What is our biggest challenge in being an artist? How do you address it?
Art must retain its social relevance. By this, I do not mean sectarian political commentary or satire. Nothing, except perhaps science fiction dates quite so quickly as party-political art. The specific target moves on; the message is de-fanged. and rendered irrelevant. Art has to transcend the immediate target in order to maintain its relevance to subsequent generations of viewers. Sleight of hand is a useful tactic here; imagery may depict one thing whilst actually being about something quite different. if the artist can produce work which is attractive and original, then so much the better. The message should take precedence over the medium.
I realise that art is a rather feeble instrument in the struggle for change or the maintenance of human and animal rights, but it is always worth the attempt.
6. What do you like/dislike about the art world?
I am not, nor ever have been a part of the ‘artworld’. I am able to operate outside its prescriptions to produce commercially viable product, safe in the knowledge that it can get along quite well without me. I am not convinced that its competition driven model which requests an entry fee at the point of submission, is suitable for judging such a wide ranging and shape-shifting field of human creativity. I prefer a DIY approach.; finding alternative spaces in which to exhibit with like-minded colleagues. Any more conventional galleries I show in are run by creative friends which seems to me a far more reliable measure of aesthetic judgement.
7. Name the artist or artists you’d like to be compared to, and why?
Comparing my work with others is, and must remain completely out of my hands. The internet has offered me the opportunity to discuss my art with other artists and students. As a result of these connections, My work has so far been compared in essays and dissertations to that of Bacon, Freud and Gormley. I am content and immensely flattered by that.
8. What is the hardest part of creating for you?
The hardest parts of my creative process remain the basic practicalities; colour, composition and the handling of line. Generating imagery is the easy part. I have shelves of sketchbooks with enough imagery to last me three times my life expectancy. I can lift projects from this information bank. For example, I have only recently completed a painting [and tribute to my father] for which I had begun drawings and preparatory compositions in 2005.
9. What is the role of an artist in society?
The role of the professional artist is to play Cassandra. To highlight social issues through visual metaphor and the use of synecdoche; selecting that visual encapsulation which speaks of the greater picture. George Orwell is my model here. Indeed; I have set up a project for fellow artists who also see the themes in his writings as stimulus for their works entitled ‘Room 103’. Selections from this group pool have so far been shown in Manchester, Leeds, West Wales and Oxford University.
10. Tell me about your favorite medium.
Oil painting is my medium of choice. Rumours of its demise have been greatly exaggerated -usually by those who cannot harness its subtleties, versatility, physicality, its almost limitless potential.
There is something still quite magical about the process of creating pastes made of coloured powders and oil to carry metaphysical propositions from maker to viewer . Something fundamentally historical; connecting our self-regarding sophistication with those nature-fearing cave dwellers making their wall paintings of coloured muds by firelight. When our lithium ion reserves are exhausted, we will still have hue bearing minerals -if we decide we are going to save our planet, that is.
Having said all this, I do enjoy the process of shooting and editing art video.
11. Where do you find inspiration?
Where do I find my artistic stimulus? Through a synthesis of conversation, experience, reading, the outdoors, museums and the internet. My work practice is embedded in a venn diagram -in four dimensions, as the relative importance of each element changes through time, from project to project.
12. When is your favourite time of day to create?
There is no good time of day to create. Painting is always hard effort, even now. I developed my new studio space just weeks before the first Covid lockdown. It’s lighting system now means that my hours of visual creativity have been extended beyond the hours of daylight. Very liberating.
13. Describe how art is important to society.
What is art’s importance to society? I would urge any sceptic to look around them. The paint or paper on the walls; designed or mixed by artists. The carpet or flooring; visualised by artist/designers. Their clothes? Shoes? Fashion accessories? Ditto. The objects on the work surface before them; designed by artists. The movie or programme showing on their flatscreen was made by a team of set designers, scenic artists, CGI artists, lighting photographers costumiers; all had a hand in the production. That is before we even consider Musicians, writers and playwrights as artists…I think that is quite enough to be going along with…
“You may think you know what you are dealing with, but believe me, you don’t..”
Nigel Evans. You just don’t know what the guy is going to be up to next. Songwriter and performer, scriptwriter and film maker, exhibition photographer, poet, D.J, writer; probably more. He’s done ‘em all, and now he can add film festival director to his creative folio.
The Cynon Valley Film Festival, 14th -16th October 2022 was his brainchild; the culmination of a year’s hard work; attracting submissions, raising sponsorship, working through the process of selection with a panel of judges. Because he was able to attract funding to the project, Nigel was able to present the whole weekend as a free event. What other entertainment over three evenings have you been to recently which cost you nothing for the admission ticket?
He was aided in the quest for a suitable venue by his partner, Karin Mear who is a tireless promoter of the St Elvan’s Community Heritage Project, Aberdare. [https://www.facebook.com/groups/3080357511997143].
And what a venue. St Elvans is the geographical centre of the town; unmistakeable from all approaches -our first view was on the descent of Maerdy Mountain via the A4233. I expected the interior space below that high Victorian steeple to be solemn gloom. Not at all; instead of fussy ornamentation on every available surface, it has an elegant simplicity and brightness which emphasises by contrast the polychromatic beauty of the rood screen.
A modern mezzanine level which usually serves as a gallery space, proved ideal for hosting the festival.
Nigel deployed his social media to publicise the event . Beginning with sporadic forays on Facebook, the campaign accelerated as the film-makers themselves supplemented his bulletins by providing trailers on their own platforms and shared each other’s contributions. So by the time I walked in on Friday evening, I was already looking forward to around ten particular movies on the listings.
Programme
The programme was a cineaste’s dream; a multiplicity of approaches to filmmaking in a wide range of media from around the world. It was gratifying to see so much impressive work by Welsh makers. How much longer can our London-based cultural commentators ignore art produced in Wales and the provinces? CVFF could not be dismissed as an insular exercise in creative nationalism, however; here was a genuinely international festival. As one might expect, there were films submitted by American and Canadian directors, but they had to share screen-time with movies of Iranian, Peruvian, Argentinian French and Swiss origin. The first evening concluded with works from Ukraine -and from Russia; demonstrating that the creative imperative recognises no geopolitical frontiers.
Contrasts abounded. Dialogue-rich pieces abutted next to silent works; black and white [it still has a special allure for me] with super-saturated colour; handmade animation beside Pixar-quality CGI. The dispassionate locked-off camera style following on from the roving, frenetic movements of the handheld camera with it’s sense of complete involvement as part of the action. The poetic competing with the visceral..
Each movie had great merit; there were none which wouldn’t hold appeal for some film fan. I find it difficult to select favourites from an event comprising work which had all been so lovingly executed. I suppose as I am painting myself into a corner here, I will simply mention some films I would particularly like to see for a second time someday very soon.
Heavy Petting Brendan Prost [Canada]. One of those pieces which defy categorisation. A journey through alienation and rejection, tracing the limits of verbal communication, with quite spellbinding episodes of magic realism contrasted with bleak everyday existence.
Dad: When a Man loves a Woman Geraint Benney [Wales]. Father-Son , Husband -Wife relationships; The burden of loss and the battle to keep the lid on grief; explored through a glorious slice of mundanity set on a park bench. Watch out for the coat hanger swinging on the back of the door; one of those beautiful little playful visual asides which add nothing to the plot, but reveal so much more about the character played by the actor -and the director.
Morgue Keith Williams [Wales]. A morality play set within the horror genre. The callousness of the worker [dressing the deceased bodies in his charge in party hats and taking selfies with them] is about to be answered. One probably knows what is going to happen fairly early on, but is happily carried along the way by the energetic style of the piece nevertheless.
Home Anthony Bunko [Wales] The tables are turned on a delinquent housebreaker by the occupant determined to reconstruct his shattered family unit. From very early on, it is evident that this is the work of a master scriptwriter. There are some delicious lines of dialogue here and they are not wasted by the actors in this two-hander; who deliver them with measured relish. I couldn’t decide whether this should be filed with Hitchcock and his ‘wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time’ classics, or beside the controlled menace and borderline absurdity of Pinter. Probably between the two. This showing was followed by an illuminating Q&A conducted by Nigel in which Anthony revealed that the source material was based on an actual incident several years ago; an event so shocking that he couldn’t possibly not adapt it. Merthyr-based, he has attuned himself to the rhythms and language of his locale, lending a gritty naturalism and an honesty to his writing and direction. He is also possessed of a generosity of spirit; he made mention of the vital contribution made by the set dresser and props buyer to the authenticity and atmosphere of the film; an issue particularly close to my heart as a former scenic artist [another of those largely neglected spear carrier occupations of the set…].
What Comes Next? John Crerar [Wales] Footage reclaimed and re-edited to plot a course of public celebration and festivity shot around wales from VE Day to the Festival of Britain period. A strange and captivating film. Captivating because the footage shows ordinary people experiencing times of communal pleasure; children watching a Punch and Judy show; adolescents and adults parading through the streets in exotic costume and decorated floats. Delightful. Yet strange, because as L.P.Hartley observed, “the past is another country; they do things differently there”. They make up with ‘blackface’ to portray Native Americans, Indians under the Raj and chained Negro slaves being driven under the whip by their colonial master. These episodes now make a culturally aware audience acutely uncomfortable; perhaps some of us wanted to laugh at the sheer absurdity of it all; we didn’t. We might have preferred not to see it at all, but this kind of newsreel footage does need to be viewed . We cannot and should not cherrypick those episodes of our history which we feel worthy of presentation. That way leads to misinformation, misinterpretation of history and leaves only propaganda. Does the innocence of children still extend to laughing uncontrollably at Mr.Punch beating to death Judy’s child; leading only to distress and tears once the crocodile makes his appearance and begins to menace the protagonists, I wonder? What I found particularly interesting was the thread running through the work tracing foodstuff packaging. Early in the piece, the hold of a ship is being filled by carcasses; wrapped in muslin, but still recognisably an animal, which once had a limb at each corner -and a head. By the film’s end, the development of department stores has been established, and with them, the sanitisation of our food; that is food which comes in geometric, stackable blocks, with no connection to any species of origin. A rather telling indicator of our separation from, and desensitisation to our environment. a marvellous piece of research and editing, accompanied by a fine musical soundtrack
Awards
The full list of Awards.
Best Welsh Film – Frank (dir. Jesse Briton & Buddug Jones) Wales
Best Cynon Valley Film – Dad: When A Man Loves A Woman (dir. Geraint Benney) Wales
Best International Narrative Short – Heavy Petting (dir. Brendan Prost) Canada
Best Experimental Film – Transmission (dir. Paul Williams) Wales
Best Director – Luke Walters (Wheels) Wales
Best Soundtrack – The Lights Of Dawn (dir. Sadie Duarte, composer Daniel Angelus) Spain
Best Documentary – Don’t Fence Me In (dir. Mary Elaine Evans) USA
Best Student Film – Midas (dir. Ben Meyer, Mav Vitale, Lisa Qingyi Liu) USA
Best Narrative Feature – What’s The Craic? (dir Lauren Hakulinen) France
Best Screenplay – Mersey Boys: A Letter From Al Moran (Dir. Paddy Murphy & Steven Gerard Farrell) Ireland
Festival Director’s Award – thoughtpolice 4891 (dir. Glenn Ibbitson & Melanie Davies)
Best Music Video – Elusive Dreams (dir. Rhys Davies (Furball Films))
.
Nigel has forced me to consign my well-worn “NON- award-winning Artist” T-shirt to the waste bin, as thoughtpolice4891 garnered the ‘Festival Director’s Award’. Peter Mount [camera] Glenn Ibbitson [director/editor] and Melanie Davies [writer/performer] accept their ‘Nigel’ on behalf of the Attic Theatre, Newcastle Emlyn.
Thank you to Nigel Evans, Karin Mear and all the staff and volunteers of St Elvan’s, Aberdare for ensuring that this event was free to the public. Thanks to official event photographer, James Woodward. I look forward to a follow-up festival sometime.
The Orwell inspired film ‘Thought Police 4891’; featuring Attic Artists Melanie Davies, Claire Woolley and Louise Mary Weldon, has been selected for the Cynon Valley Film Festival. Friday 14th – Sunday 16th October, 2022 St Elvan’s Church, Aberdare, Rhondda Cynon Taf, Wales, UK, CF44 7AB ‘Thought Police 4891’ will be screened on the Saturday; time to be finalised.
Acting, Scriptwriting, and the Gentle Art of Intimidation; in Conversation with the Attic Playersabout ‘Thoughtpolice4891’
C Claire Woolley
L Louise Weldon
M Melanie Davies
K Kay Margerison
G Glenn Ibbitson
Melanie Davies
G We first met during lockdown [back in 2020, socially distanced in the car park in Newcastle Emlyn]. I remember that the four of you [Kay Margerison, another of the Attic Players, was there too] were more enthusiastic than I could have hoped for. What were your preliminary thoughts and ideas? How did you pitch the Orwell theme to the Attic Players as a group? was the group just content to let you run with the project as a sideline to their main programme?
M when we first got together
C in the carpark -we were excited straight away
L After meeting in the car park we pitched the idea to the other Attic members,
M. It was a time of Covid, so people were doing other monologues
C because we met you we had more of a connection with the project. We felt it was something we all wanted to creatively engage with.
L I remember George Orwell from school where we read Nineteen Eighty-Four and was interested to revisit it and find out what his work was about. His writing is so clean and concise. He’s fascinating; he’s such a good writer.
M we were genuinely intellectually engaged with the subject matter, The theatre wants to join in with local events and engage with all sorts of things, and with this Orwell project, we were offered something and we just went “ofcourse we want to do this!”
C It’s great joining local events and that can be good advertising, whereas this felt like there could be some real artistic input
L Also relevant politically today. What’s going on. It was a relevant project. Plus; I do like to dress up
C Yeah, you do Lou
M So Lou; you did your piece first for one of our monologues.
Louise Mary Weldon
L The first one was the shouty one I was just so driven by the project and keen. I got dressed up one day and said to Pete [Weldon], film this. No rehearsal straight in; filmed in one take, and that was that..
M and then you came to ours to film a second monologue.
L The second scene was more considered and Mel and Peter [Mount] kindly helped with it.
M We all read the book .
C We decided that because time was quite short, we decided to focus in on Nineteen Eighty-Four after reading some of the other essays.
L Too much to filter. Nineteen Eighty-Four lets stick to that
C Its got nice strong themes
L Each of us would go away and work out a little piece that we thought was relevant.
G Sadly, Orwell is linked in some literary circles with Hemingway as a writer overly preoccupied by ‘male’ concerns. I was impressed that you switched the emphasis from Winston Smith to the women. You found relevance in the book from a female perspective which I felt heartened by.
C Because we are all female we focused on the female stories in it and we all saw the different facets of how women are represented in the book. That is what interested us most. We looked at the prole women and the women in the party and the mum and neighbour; guilty and terrorised by her children
M and Claire’s mother at the sink, intimidated by her own children
Claire Woolley
L My newsreader was just a generic ‘shouty, shouty’.
C You had the idea of having more of a political reference linking with today.
L I looked at the ‘Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill’ and I picked themes out of that and into the newsreader’s pitch to the people added in to make it link and connect to what is relevant today; which is shocking.
C so we had the idea of looking at the women in the book. We then pieced together scripts
M Individually
C finding relevant bits of the book. I felt that, for me, the prostitute was one of the strongest female images. That image of the prostitute as being superficially very pretty but then getting up close and realising she is quite old and haggard and clearly desperate, was for me one of the strong images in the book
K Lou, why did you do the rat in the cage?
M its a good image
L My memory of reading the book as a young person was that cage
M iIs the abiding image of that whole book
L It’s horrendous, isn’t it?
G Your film, ‘Thought Police 4891’ is very episodic; when editing, I realised that the tableaux could be arranged in any order. Was that deliberate in your working method?
M It kind of made sense because of the short time frame we had to put it together;
reading separately, researching separately then coming together with our stuff made sense
L It was the only way to do it in the time given.
M We didn’t want to meet together all the time and rehearse a play
C Or write a script for it
L The way we devised it we came together and discussed and went away and worked out our bits and came back together.
C and we like each other; we trust each other.
M and we are thinking differently to perhaps a lot of people who contributed to the exhibition, who work individually, we very much work as a group. All our contributions are accepted , talked through, then, because there is a lack of ego in this particular group of women, none of us are going, “Me. I’m doing it. my thing is the best thing.”
C Though Mel is mostly always right.
M There is that, yeah.
L We would go away and come back knowing that each of us had given it our best shot and had listened to what we had discussed in a previous rehearsal so that it did all meld.
M and we are prepared to give things up.
G Would you consider adding scenes to what you have already done? I know that you Mel, had a ‘watcher’ episode, which I didn’t think through properly before our video shoot. Mea culpa.
M Being watched does play into the women thing. I know they are all being watched. We are all interested in the role women play in the world generally and that is something the we naturally go to as a starting point for work.
C If we had had more time I would have also really have liked to have done the dark haired girl who’s following behind Winston, spying on him. Who is this person? Can I trust them?
L I would like to look at Julia’s back story. How? Where? What? Explore her character.
C The torture scene; we didn’t plan that at all it wasn’t worked out beforehand
M It came out of improvisation skills. and our working together on other things. our past work together informs this work.
Two pieces of art which draw upon the Polar Bear for their inspiration; one a meditation on the destruction of the Polar Bear’s environment using vintage imagery designed by Fox’s Glacier Mints; the other a specific tribute to Misha, who for many years was incarcerated in a concrete enclosure at Bristol Zoo.
“The manipulation of commercial packaging from readily identifiable brands to convey in some small way the present menace which our planet faces in this dark age of the Anthropocene. Shrinking glacier mints and melting confections may seem to some to be making light of a disastrous situation, but if I chose to fight fire with fire on this issue, the grim realisation of my own ineffectuality would result in my pulling my own teeth out with rusty pliers….”
Glenn Ibbitson July 2022
Rolex and the bear
And so, for the last time, in the ninth month of the year two thousand and twenty two, Bristol Zoo will close its gates. There are, it’s said,
plans, both for a new zoo somewhere else and for houses, a community led scheme with leisure facilities. It looks pretty
in the socially inclusive coloured image. Where once we gawped at creatures, for one hundred and eighty six years. Even while we worried
about the happiness of the residents, about the ethics of their captive state, it remained a regular haunt, an easy place to take the kids,
to roam with motley visitors. My favourite, from when I was first breeding my first child, as my centre of gravity seemed daily to shift,
was the polar bear enclosure. Favourite’s a misnomer. What drew me back was horrible fascination, an itch to trap and gnaw at, a deep sadness, for the bear who paced.
His name was Misha, rescued from a circus. So the repetition, the damaged pattern to his tortured days was, in part, we told ourselves, due to the life
he’d lived before, not just to the concrete glacier upon which he now found himself. The size of his home, its gulag awfulness, the dull grey whiteness of his pelt…
it all appalled us yet again we went, pulled back, as if to check whether something might have changed. It never did.
*
In hospital at sixteen, a couple of months, no more, with a bunch of other distressed adolescents. We all were struggling, jailed for our own protection and all united
in our unending shock at witnessing hourly, daily, relentlessly, the boy who rocked and keened. So far in it seemed he’d never find a way back out. So with Misha,
the polar bear, far from cuddly, glowing polar white, far from thick soft fur, from home, from snow, from ice, so far from everything we knew to be right.
*
On my twenty fourth birthday my roving, interesting aunt sent me a watch – you’ll see time differently when the baby comes – she wrote. It was a Rolex Oyster, small, not showy. I think
my aunt was gifting her possessions. She owned a lot, but maybe just was strapped for cash. A brief issue with liquidity. When the baby came, I did not see time.
My wrist so slender – the watch slipped off, fell, smashed into the polar bear enclosure. We went back. There was no trace. I’ve never had a Rolex since nor seen another polar bear incarcerate.
Attic Theatre’s latest culinary delight. “Just Supper” is as “finely fine as a fine thingy…” but be warned; “Its a bit weird though, isn’t it?”
Think of a play based around a supper party and “Abigail’s Party” may come to mind. This production certainly stands favourable comparison with Mike Leigh’s work, but is closer in feel to “High Hopes” or “Another Year”, with believably fallible characters responding to the moral dilemmas which surround them.
Maddie [Melanie Davies] is your hostess for the evening, but when we first meet her, she is clearly a stressed driver with no sat-nav to guide her. It is Bob, her husband who has instigated this little gathering and of course, he is already dead at the wheel. So why has he been so insistent that this particular group of people gather together after his cremation? What are his specific instructions that they must follow? Maddie herself has no idea. After all; “they are not my friends…” not the best recipe for a supper.
It seems that Maddie’s sister Roni [Claire Woolley] has been dealt a somewhat unsatisfactory hand by fate, but maintains a capacity to see the best in people. A feminist yes; conscious of the damage a patriarchal system has wreaked on both her sex and the planet, but who resists the temptation to see men as stereotypes. She provides Maddie with her support system. Bob’s too, as it transpires. She has been entrusted with his message, which is to be delivered from beyond his casket, designed and hand painted by Dee.
Dee [Deborah Messenger] is a generous, creative dynamo with diverse entrepreneurial enthusiasms. Given the right opportunity and a degree of focus which alas, may forever elude her, she could single-handedly turn West Wales into an economic powerhouse; setting up workshops on any theme from badge-making for women, to the production of log burner baskets and of course decorated boxes for humanist ceremonies…
Tom [Rodney Davis] is a Bluff rock climber as impervious to the etiquette of social gatherings as the Idwal slabs he hacks into to fix a piton. With a fine line in grudging tribute “Bob was a good man -everyone respected him -though not as a rock climber of course”, he is a euphemism-free zone who can mansplain for Britain. Supremely self confident, one can picture him suspended on a Snowdonia rock face. A mountaineer with just one Achilles heel -or rather, back…
Pru [Louise Weldon] ”I am being so lovely“ is every bit as socially graceless as Tom, but her concerns are more elevated than any of his conquered peaks. “Better to think of the planet and not yourself”; “Why drive, when you can catch public transport?” Her moral inflexibility is admirable while her priggishness undercuts any sympathy for her at every turn. Maddie’s difficult choice between raising a family and maintaining her political activism is answered with a cold, thoughtless, “same old story; you were left holding the baby -bad luck!” One can simultaneously sympathise completely with her moral stance and yet hope never to have to spend five minutes in her company.
Clive [John Franks] is a Knight of the realm and a national treasure. Think Attenborough here. Described as “passionate” , he is a media phenomenon with the ability to make people plant trees in an attempt to capture carbon and green over the world. A celebrity eco-warrior in the corner of every sitting room on the small screen, but can all his activities offset his own carbon footprint and his runaway accumulation of air miles? Pru recalls an earlier meeting with him and sneers, “and you flew in to.. provide support..” Is he all he appears to be?
Adie [Semele Xerri] is Pru’s gift from God; delivered to her at the end of act one. She proves herself to be more logical than her dog collar might at first suggest. As Maddie observes, the fact that by ‘crashing’ the party uninvited, she is in a unique position of not having been manipulated by the late Bob and can cast an objective eye over his extreme masterplan.
By the end of act one, these unstable, combustible ingredients have been assembled. Act two will see the touch paper ignited… at 8 o’clock, from which time Bob himself [Colin Partridge] will quite literally loom over the second half, outlining a call to action at once hilariously ludicrous and yet strangely appealing. It might just work…
Of course the script doesn’t provide all the answers to life’s great questions. After all, it only skirts around the potential joys of last-minute sex. It can’t satisfactorily explain why chores which a woman regards as routine become elevated to the heights of a ceremonial when performed by a man [all you barbecue-ers take note; there is a cooker in the kitchen for you to use on the other 362 days of the year..] And hard-line feminists may wince to hear that a woman who wants a baby more than anything else in the world doesn’t care what surname she or it will labour under through life. It does however clarify why Llangrannog is a far better location for ending it all than Poppit Sands.
More significantly, it asks us to imagine what mainstream Western art might have looked like if women had been allowed to be artists earlier in time and offers a tantalising glimpse into a cultural world of galleries filled with felting, spinning or knitting -if men had crafted in those media instead of moving coloured pigments around canvas, or sculpting in stone and bronze. Or, put another way; what might the lie of the cultural and economic landscape now be if our established economic system based on the impediment of sexual difference and reproduction roles in which “men take the space and women slot into whatever is left”, had been moulded by the women?
Judging by the amount of knowing head-nodding from sections of the female audience around me this evening, this dialogue between the characters is thoroughly authentic. The conversation crackles with energy and vibrant wit. These are people who think; they care about the important social and political matrix they are embedded in, but they still have immense fun together. Yes, change for the ‘second sex’ may be “verrrreee sloooowww”, but they are going to have a bloody good try at pushing it along. Besides; they have a whole planet to save.
Poor plodding males like me who think they have become ‘new men’ because they have incorporated the title ‘Ms.’ into their lexicon are in for an awakening, as are the blokes who confuse diatribe with dialogue and insist on textbook-derived explanations for any phenomenon for which they have no direct lived experience.
The battle of the sexes is an ingredient in this incendiary mix -but only one, and anyway, we have seen that Melanie Davies is not a playwright to take any path well travelled. Anyone who remembers ‘Power and Petticoats’ will know just how thoughtfully crafted and cliché-averse her writing is. She is not afraid to lead her audience into edgy territory, but the quality of dialogue never falters. Recalling a climbing axe with an horrendous pet name provokes the memorably stylish double negative rejoinder, “People didn’t pretend not to be racist in the eighties”; as pithy and accurate a comment on that decade as I can think of. She allows her increasingly uncomfortable audience to jump from the oncoming car crash of having to sit through an off-the-spectrum joke,- but only at the last second.
So many plays use the device of a group meeting to construct a situation where frictions can escalate and drive the narrative. There is a set-up, a plot line and a denouement, neatly bookended; packaged with all threads neatly trimmed, and there is nothing wrong with that, except real life doesn’t operate within set boundaries. Davies [I now hesitate to use the prefix, Ms.] presents us with characters who have led their lives before the point at which we meet them; they will continue to live their lives after the auditorium has emptied. We have only shared a couple of hours in their company. There are even comments left hanging loose from the script to suggest that these people have personal histories which are not particularly relevant to the current narrative; unusual in theatre. Dee’s comment that “You were ill at the time weren’t you Maddie?” is batted away with a flick of the wrist, and we are left to ponder why Bob preferred Roni’s company on an eco-activism event to that of his wife… these are morsels worth pursuing, but they are left untouched on the plate.
A word on the playing and direction. It is a joy, when as a member of the audience, ones eyes can rove across the ensemble in any scene and see their individual responses to the conversations around them as if it were the first time they had heard those sentences uttered, or seen this or that gesture being made. Their sense of engagement with each other is palpable from the sixth row. This is naturalistic playing of the very highest order.; everything timed to perfection. Personal highlights? Pru’s delicious inability to contain her unalloyed joy when Adie finally arrives, and Roni and Clive’s first meeting, which is a perfectly played moment of emotional restraint suggesting everything about a past friendship/relationship which was curtailed for some unspecified reason, without either actor actually spelling out anything at all.
So yet another captivating evening of theatre which should see everyone involved now briefly basking in the glow of another success, before thinking about touring this production. After all; why should we in West Wales be the only fortunate recipients of such quality entertainment? Me? I’m going to enroll on Dee’s workshop. My partner thinks a mansplainer button badge would suit me perfectly…
A thumbnail sketch of gallery owner Louise Weldon and a preview of her climate crisis group exhibition at the Seagull Gallery in Cardigan @Pembrokeshire Online can be read here.
‘Sticky Fingers’ Is the latest exhibition now showing at Oriel Q in Narberth. Painter and printmaker Carole King is curator for this show of eighty prints. It is a show of original printwork ranging from etchings, through monotype and collagraph to serigraphs, from artists across Wales. Carole is not new to the business of show curating; she has arranged several solo shows, has co-curated the arts and fine crafts shows arranged by ‘the Square Pegs’ and two surveys of Welsh drawing entitled ‘Lines and Strata’.
So where does her interest in printmaking come from?
“I was introduced to silkscreen printing at teacher training college in Cambridge. I produced a series of images based on curtains blowing in the breeze. The process seemed quite magical to me. ” Like so many artists, that first experience developed into a love affair with inky processes.
“I began by working on a kitchen table, designing and printing the family Christmas card. I now have a dedicated space housing a screenprinting bed [purchased through Ebay from Wakefield college of Art], and a portable roller etching press suitable for producing relief prints, monotypes, drypoints and collagraphs.”
West Wales is proving to be a hotbed of print activity. To the North, Aberystwyth Printmakers are
based in dedicated out of town facilities near Bow Street, while Swansea Printmakers occupy premises near the city centre. Walden Arts in Cardigan offer workshops in printmaking.
Carole too is herself a resource for would-be printmakers. She has taught a variety of printmaking techniques through a series of workshops; in Surrey, at her studio in Newcastle Emlyn and at Oriel Q. “It is always a pleasure to see the sheer joy on a student’s face when a successful print has emerged from between press rollers. I feel I can share in their achievement at that moment.”
She is also a bookbinder. For her, printmaking is integral to that activity too. “I design my own covers and print them on a silkscreen bed in my studio. I employ my printmaking skills to produce the covers, printing my own designs. The bookbinding grew out of a need to make sketchbooks at college, where I used prints which were not of exhibitable standard [her quality control, level is set to ‘high’].” Now the books [blank sketchbooks, notebooks, wedding photograph albums, address books] are for sale to the general public, each with their own hand printed cover papers.
Perhaps the title of the show is a little misleading, as digital prints are produced through clean means on a computer or tablet in conjunction with a printer [unless of course there is a problem when replacing a leaky ink cartridge!] “There is great potential with digital printing and I was happy to accept digital submissions as long as they were originally generated on the computer and not simply an enhanced reproduction of an existing piece of artwork from another medium.”
Though for now, the bulk of artwork on display utilises media and techniques which would have been familiar to Durer, Rembrandt and Hokusai. Scratching, gouging and biting into surfaces with acid. There is something satisfyingly timeless to the activity, though the products of these endeavours are resolutely contemporary as the methods keep evolving. Come and take a look; surface interest, technical prowess, vibrant colour and across all subject matter there really is something for everyone -whether they themselves have sticky fingers or not…
SMOKINGBRUSH 