HUMBER STREET GALLERY, HULL
JAMIE CREWE: SOLIDARITY & LOVE
17 January 2020 — 29 April 2020 (extended).
Humber Street Gallery (Hull) and Grand Union (Birmingham) have co-commissioned sister exhibitions of new work by Jamie Crewe comprising video, sculpture, text, and print: Solidarity & Love in Hull, and Love & Solidarity in Birmingham.
This body of work is about repulsive kinships. It thinks about places, cultures, histories, communities, and individuals that are tied to each other, whether they like it or not. It is stuck on the pain and compromised pleasure of such entanglements.
The work begins with Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness. This book is a portrait of Stephen Gordon, a masculine lover of women who wants to be a country gentleman like her father. The book thwarts her desires, and has been an influence on many anglophone queer and lesbian women, regarded both as a stirring representation and an insidious antique. It has also been interpreted as a transgender narrative, with some readers arguing that Stephen might be better understood as a trans man. Stephen, however, refers to herself as an ‘invert’: a sexological term from the early 20th century which has fallen out of use, and an identity which falls between the divided categories of ‘homosexual’ and ‘transgender.’
Solidarity & Love at Humber Street Gallery opens with a blood-drenched portico: the entrance of the top floor gallery has been flooded with red light. Beyond this is a darkened space containing two new videos, both based around conflict and camaraderie, looping simultaneously. One video, titled “Morton” – “Beedles” – “An abyss”, is projected on a screen; the other, titled “The Ideal Bar” – “Le Narcisse” – “Alec’s”, is played on a smaller monitor which stands before the projection screen, intruding upon the larger and longer video, and intruded upon in turn.
“The Ideal Bar” – “Le Narcisse” – “Alec’s” is a dramatised exchange between two characters in a Glasgow nightclub, inspired by a sequence in The Well of Loneliness in which Stephen encounters a repellent reflection of herself in a Parisian gay bar. These characters are portrayed by performance maker and ogre SHREK 666, and performance artist and music producer TAAHLIAH, who switch roles in the version shown at Grand Union. This exchange is punctuated, as in Radclyffe Hall’s text, by the image of a panting, dying fox. Though it demands compassion, this fox is not real, and its blood looks perhaps more like lipstick. The video is scored by a hyperventilating concertina.
“Morton” – “Beedles” – “An abyss” i s a video documenting Radclyffe Hall – a concomitant group of artists, writers, and others, working under the author’s name and in this case composed of Jamie Crewe, Nicky Crewe, Vicky Crewe, Seán Elder, Laura Guy, John Heffernan, Mason Leaver-Yap, and Kim McAleese – engaging in a traditional craft from the Peak District, where Jamie grew up. The video shows this group, over the course of two days in Birmingham’s Modern Clay ceramics studio, making a bastardised version of a well dressing. Well dressings are decorative pallets of clay into which designs are formed with fresh flowers, seeds, wool, and other natural materials. These are erected around the wells of certain Derbyshire villages and towns each summer, in a tradition which dates from the 1800s. “Morton” – “Beedles” – “An abyss” focuses on the group’s hands doing the detailed, demanding work of constructing such designs, which, in this case, are not traditional: drawn from disparate sources, they touch on themes of heartbreak, LGBT+ solidarity, the legacy of The Well of Loneliness, and more. The audio reflects this, as conversation recorded during the assemblage branches into varied discussions: of going to — or refusing to go to — Pride celebrations; of the social function of well dressing as experienced by Jamie, Nicky, and Vicky; of instances of transphobia; and more. In this, there are small moments of friction and revelation, born from the combination of disparate people — and deep investments — working together under one name.
There is a crack in the olive green curtain which splits Humber Street Gallery’s top floor gallery and forms this dark space for video viewing. Through this aperture daylight enters, and a steel rail is installed, cutting through the gap and leading into the second half of the gallery. On this steel rail are copies of a printed work, titled “Womanhood”, of which around 3,000 copies exist, displayed across the two venues and available for any viewer to take away. The cover design of this is based on the cover design of The Sink of Solitude (1928), an illustrated lampoon of The Well of Loneliness written by Beresford Egan, P. R. Stephensen, and ‘Several Hands’. “Womanhood”, too, has things to say about Radclyffe Hall: through collaged excerpts of the novel, drawings, and a first-person narrative written with a knife, the work addresses the pain of disenfranchisement, and the contrary, almost spiteful endurance of hope.
Past the rail is the second half of the gallery, in which a free-standing wall faces the far window, illuminated from behind by the glow of the dividing curtain, which on this side is fluorescent orange. This wall displays a series of fired clay slabs: the products of the labour depicted in “Morton” – “Beedles” – “An abyss”. Traditionally a well dressing would be erected for one or two weeks, then begin to dry out and degrade, and so be taken down. Its design would be destroyed, and the clay and boards would be reclaimed and stored for the next year. In this case, however, the design has been cut into sections and fired in a kiln. What remains on the pale clay are marks of imprint, shadows of pigment, and a few scorched remains. These 25 fired clay objects – all called “A slab”, and subtitled (as with all works in the exhibition) with quotes from The Well of Loneliness – are split across Grand Union and Humber Street Gallery, often leaving designs partial or cut in half. What remains can be closely observed: there is “A slab” — “Large brown hand”, which shows a recoiling hand; there is “A slab” — “Sore heart” — “One”, which shows one side of a barbed broken heart; there is “A slab” — “Aunt”, on which a pinne-down doll of straw and hessian has burned to almost nothing; there is “A slab” — “Unfruitful breast”, which shows androgynous breasts with purposeful tattoos and a labrys pendant; there is “A slab” — “In the gold haze of late afternoon”, which shows Radclyffe Hall's birthplace viewed through a yonic aperture, or the half-closed eye of someone on the ground; there is “A slab” — “Dignity and pride without ostentation”, which shows a snake knotted to death; there is “A slab” — “Mirrors thickly painted with cupids”, which reproduces an illustration from The Sink of Solitude; there are two thirds of “A slab” — “Our three selves”, which in full shows interlocked symbols; and there is “A slab” — “Protesting roses” — “One”, which shows a quote from gay activist Randy Wicker about his late friend and former enemy, the transgender activist Sylvia Rivera
Alongside these slabs is another sculptural work: “Little red fox”, which is the fox model seen in “The Ideal Bar” – “Le Narcisse” – “Alec’s”, curled up on a plinth topped with fake grass. Its tail has been cut off, and taken to Grand Union as a separate work. Through the resulting sacrococcygeal wound an armature of aluminium wire and blue foam can be seen. This model–gangly, oversized, not entirely convincing–echoes the foxes Stephen Gordon hunts in The Well of Loneliness, as well as the ‘male inverts’ she despises.
Bluntly split, this body of work survives in partial form, spread across two cities, two venues, and two exhibitions. This is in accordance with its themes; together, and apart, Love & Solidarity and Solidarity & Love test the possibility of living with a wound.
A digital publication which accompanies this exhibition, featuring writing by Juliet Jaques, Nat Raha and Shola Von Reinhold, illustrated and designed by Jamie Crewe, is available on request.
