if you could save one place . . .
12 Northgate, Chichester West Sussex PO19 1BA +44 (0)1243 528401 +44 (0)7794 416569 info@candidastevens.com www.candidastevens.com
For the 2023 edition of London Art Fair, 12 artists have made a work in response to the question, If you could save one place . . .
This sparked a range of responses from the artists. Interestingly only a few of the works made are place specific. Several refer to home, others to a moment, others refer to a notion, others to an environmental phenomena that they have personally witnessed.
The reason for asking the question? We must stay engaged in order to catalyse change: we need to nurture agency and empowerment. Artists have the power through their work to engage an audience.
Each of them writes a poignant and personal account about what they have made and why. I would like to thank each of them for taking on this project with such trust and enthusiasm.
Candida Stevens.
Artists;
Raffael Bader
Pippa Blake
Nici Bungey
Fred Coppin
Ben Crawford
Charlotte Evans
Kerry Harding
Alice Kettle
Suzanne Knight
Katharine Le Hardy
Calum McClure
Veronica Smirnoff
Raffael Bader
There are places in the world that exist in real terms, that we can visit. They exist in the tangible world, but not only there. We also carry them within us, with us. They are places that are familiar to us and that we dream about. We dream of them and they make us dream while we linger at them.
The external world is changing and this changes our view of it. It changes how we think and feel about it. Fears and worries might grow and cause us to lose sight of what is essential.
If I could serve one place, it would be the one where we could dream and thereby rise above ourselves, which makes us feel our humanity that way.
Beyond the Gaze, 2022 by Raffael Bader Oil on canvas
150 x 210 cm
Pippa Blake
Wetlands are one of the ecosystems most under threat globally and in the UK, both from coastal development and sea levels rising. I grew up, live and work in a wetland area around Chichester Harbour on the south coast of England.
I am passionate about the impact we as human beings are having on either their survival or destruction. The destruction being caused by overdevelopment and the lack of infrastructures being put into place. However Atchafalaya was made during a Covid lockdown when my source of information for making work was from the internet. I became intrigued by journeys on the computer and began to explore the bayou and swamps of Louisiana, a place which I’ve been long drawn to by its nature and wildlife but also as a dark place in the history of the USA . This painting was from a virtual canoe trip and exposed me to the environmental crisis of the loss of the wetlands around the Atchalfalaya Basin. The Basin is the largest area of wetland in the USA under threat from human interference as well as being a natural barrier to storm surges. As ocean temperatures rise, so do water levels and the frequency of violent storm systems. Currently, the wetlands are protected barrier islands that protect them from extreme flooding and devastation. These thoughts are ever present working in my studio near Chichester in a safe environment albeit aware that one day rising sea levels might have washed it away.
153 x 183 cm
Nici Bungey
Nici Bungey takes the concept one step further and chooses to explore the mechanisms that might destroy a place. Rather than focusing on the where in time and space, she unpicks the how. Her chosen mechanic is fire.
To a visual artist operating with sensory perceptions that are spiritual and energetic, fire is a natural choice.
“Looking deep into the fires of my childhood in the forests of Germany, and those we built with our own children, and the fire we have in our home most winter nights, I feel the security and protection of the flames. The warmth it provides, physically and spiritually. I come closer to the physical world each time I light a fire. As an artist I’m aware of the tones and subtle variations of flame, how wood burns at varying rates and intensity. I paint with reflections of light, and light is a fundamental product of fire. The alchemists flame, from base metal to gold, speaks to my creative self. As a sensitive human I feel the energetic release from one physical form to another, the transition of energy from growing trees to fallen wood, from dry chopped firewood to flame to ash”.
Fires can be ceremonial. Holy. Sacred. Fire opens the circle of energy, igniting oxygen and combustible material giving off light, heat, flame, smoke and the burnt remains as ash. Fire and ash are key elements in many religions and spiritual practices. The physics of renewal through fire and ash are found ecologically and this, along with so many elements of the physical world, find their way into the religious and spiritual building blocks of our internal worlds.
In many cultures, sky-reaching flames are paralleled with spirit, God, the pure characteristics of flame tied into renewal, cleansing, sacrifice. These are deeply entwined in our DNA. For as long as we’ve been humans living with wild and controlled fire, we’ve had moments to reflect on life and death.
Fire is an ecological destructive force and a renewer of life. From destruction through burning, ash returns carbon to our circle of life, and life renews. Through art, we sense and imagine. This piece is called ‘Fire, Building blocks’ and is an exploration of growth and renewal, of fire and flame, positioned within the entire cycle of life.
“If I could save one place, it would be the deep artistic space to consider our personal eternal flame, and how fire affects life”.
Fire, Building blocks, 2022 by Nici Bungey Acrylic on book page 44.7 x 28.5 cm
Fred Coppin
Recently I welcomed a wonderful daughter into the world and not so long ago I bid farewell to a wonderful Dad of my own. Unfortunately, the world’s timeline wouldn’t quite bend to accommodate a meeting between the two.
Amongst all the other mind-boggling realisations and adjustments that come with love and loss and parenting, it’s encouraged me to explore my relationship with my own parents more deeply and look at the unique threads that connect us and the generations to come. One of these invisible threads is a sense of place.
For me, no location offers a trove of sacred stories and memories like the rugged little coves of Lansallos beach in Cornwall. I remember my Dad telling me about being taken there as a kid and now I’ve had the chance to wander down to that same secluded little rocky world with my own child. There’s something very grounding about that. Especially given that the landscape has hardly changed over the decades so it’s even easier for your mind to time-travel back and forth.
When asked ‘If I Could Save One Place…’ it would be here. Not because of the luscious fern-laden walkways or the trees shaped by the wind, not because of the nonchalant horses or the valiant cold-water dips, but because of the story it holds.
Higher Ground, 2022
Oil on linen on panel 61 x 61 cm
Ben Crawford
I made my painting ‘a brief season of golden hours’ thinking about a place, but more specifically a time period in that place. When my children were born, we lived on a banana plantation. We had a clothesline strung between two camphor laurel trees and my wife would play with the kids under the drying laundry, watching the sun set behind the hills. This painting is about that beautiful, fleeting time in my family’s life when my kids were small and innocent, my wife and I were relatively young and healthy and all those ‘golden hours’ together were so happy and precious. I think it’s a ‘place’ a lot of people get to experience in their lives, if only briefly, before life gets more complicated.
168 x 153 cm
Charlotte Evans
With this year’s house move we inherited a garden with barely a plant in it. The previous owners had won Eco awards for their garden of arranged rocks and creeping thyme. Elegant and better still, no watering required- unlike the slabs of manicured, pristine grass so popular in North America. But no plants, no colour and, more importantly, no bugs. My daughter astutely told the previous owners ‘you like rocks, we like plants’. The subtlety of 6 year olds! As we set about filling the garden I immediately noticed a change - especially the increasing frequency with which we were visited by huge and delicate monarch butterflies, drawn particularly to a lanky ‘butterfly bush’, a buddleia, we planted in the corner. So beguiling, so vital. But Monarchs are now endangered. Climate change is disrupting their migratory paths, there’s deforestation of their chosen overwintering forests in Mexico, and increasingly a loss of native wildflowers they depend on for food, here. If I could save that one place and at least plant an infinite number of butterfly bushes, fields of milkweed…..
Kerry Harding
Without any previous connections to Cornwall or even the coast, moving here in 1999 felt like ‘coming home’.
I was particularly drawn to the north, its exposure to the Atlantic and weather systems. Enthralled, in awe and comforted by the relentless inevitability of this environment my practice soon focused in on its elements and motifs.
The coastal pine encompasses everything I feel in this place. They often stand alone, framing the endless horizons behind, accommodating the extremes that leave them defiantly sculptural. This is something I hope endures, if I could save.
But unapproached it stands, 2022 by Kerry Harding Oil on canvas 120 x 120 cm
Alice Kettle
Little Bird
I left my home recently to find a new home. I have felt the intensity of losing my city home and the unfolding life of discovering the new rural home.
It has been a time of intense self-reflection whilst being locked up at home during the pandemic.
It has been a time of national and global turmoil and conflict, with constant images of destruction where homes are destroyed.
So home is the place I save as the most fundamental place of retreat, of hoped for safety, of being immersed and enclosed in this private place, of being whoever you want to be.
I extend home to encompass my garden and the countryside around, with no city streets and passing people. It is the place you can live, be alive, be creative and find new friends. I found Little Bird.
It is the place we search for to find stability and have dreams. Love, laughter, loss and collapse have all taken place there. I have friends who have lost their homes but in my mind, like Little Bird they have become part of mine.
Thread on linen 130 x 120 cm
Katharine Le Hardy
Whilst investigating human themes in my work over the last year since lockdown, the task of ‘If you could save one place’ started me thinking about places I’ve been and where I would love to revisit. I visited the rainforest in Brazil 10 years ago, the ‘lungs of the world,’ just for a short time, but some places just make you want to go back. I pulled out all my photographs and drawings from 2012 and researched the rainforest. Whilst my memory has idealised and heightened the lush and rich landscape over time, the reality is that the intervening years have been catastrophic from an environmental point of view. I see the landscape as a witness to our actions as humans and therefore, for this series of work, I felt it important to keep the landscape free from human elements.
These works are built up with layers of transparent paint. Images from different places have been layered up, like memories, to create almost entirely imagined, immersive landscapes. Each layer reacts to the mark making of the previous one. Every previous action has an effect on the next, just like ours.
Half a world away, 2022 by
Le Hardy Oil on canvas 130 x 220 cm
Suzanne Knight
If I could save one place it would be my mother’s 1970’s kitchen.
Every day as a small child I shared the morning tea table with the women in the street. What was ordinary in the 1970’s has become extraordinary in my memories - the glass milk bottle with the foil lid, the tinkering of the teaspoons stirring in the cup, my favourite ginger nut biscuits, a crocheted tea cosy, damask tablecloth and the whistle of the kettle. The kettle was plastic, the teapot was aluminium or the teacups were sometimes chipped, but in my memories these objects are priceless.
In this work I wanted to explore the extraordinary in the ordinary- making life size tapestries of those kitchen objects and adding some sparkle, to evoke my memories of that time, the specialness of that plain kitchen and the friendship of the women. Now this little kettle has the status of an heirloom treasure. It is lush and pretty and it shimmers. It is jewel-like. A damask pattern plays across its surface picking up the lights and I can hear my mother’s laughter woven into its surface.
Electric, 2022 by Suzanne Knight Wool, cotton, metallic thread, tapestry 25 x 25 cm
Calum McClure
Calum McClure has chosen to paint a location near to his new home in Italy, Cornino Lake, which is a natural source. The lake's intense blue and clarity are due to the low temperature and chemical composition of the water, which is forced to the surface continuously. This is probably the type of place Italo Calvino’s eponymous Marcovaldo had in mind when he went off in search of a place to fish tench in the chapter “Dov'è più azzurro il fiume?” (Where the river is bluer?). As with many of his other escapades his will to pursue the activities of the countryside in the city does not end well, and the beautiful blue river he finds on the city’s confines turns out to be down river from a polluting paint factory. In this painting we see McClure play on the strange and somewhat otherworldly beauty of the lake, through his use of intense colour. We are left asking what is depicted and what is imagined.
Dov’è più azzuro il fiume? (Where the river is bluer?), 2022 by Calum McClure Oil on canvas 200 x 160 cm
The red carpet is an ode to winter - the whiteness that covers the squalor and destitution.
Central to the composition is the statue facing its back to us - it is a statue of a young pioneer. The statue becomes the counterpoint and the witness of the wintery scene.
Amongst ‘chrushiovkas’, the five storey 60s council houses, a somewhat ordinary and yet ambiguous happening unfolds - there is a bonfire, but the people surrounding the fire are suspiciously proactive, which doesn’t suggest the idleness of leisurely passing time.
The final panel of the triptych depicts a gang of teenage boys carrying the red carpet.
Reasoning might be trivial - it’s what people do in the winter - clean the rugs outdoors, but the ceremonial looking procession and the symbolism of the colour red hints at a less innocent endeavour, ever so current and heartfelt at the moment.
The overall nonchalant but menacing sentiment seems to prevail in the familiar scene of the altered everyday reality.
The statue of the pioneer is reminiscent of a frozen figure, like many who freeze in the minus temperatures. It feels like these parallels are apt in the light of war and the energy crisis. I would like to save the pioneer and those that are freezing this winter.
The Red Carpet, 2013 by Veronica Smirnoff Egg tempera on wood panel 40 x 90 cm
Published in January 2023 by Candida Stevens Gallery
Catalogue © Candida Stevens Gallery
Images © The Artist Photography © Dan Stevens
All rights reserved
