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Julie Arkell
Julie Arkell ISBN 1 900941 78 3
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Julie Arkell home
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above Postcard pictures previous page Spare part doll with bird
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contents 8 Foreword Philip Hughes 13 Introduction Polly Leonard 17 Julie Arkell Mary La Trobe-Bateman 31 Home Sara Roberts 51 Artist’s statement 54 Biography 58 Acknowledgements
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foreword Make do and mend. Waste not want not. A stitch in time saves nine. The Ministry of Information's catch phrases in World War II were not new. But crucially they emphasised that clever people have always done it. Recycling is not a late 20th century invention, but part of a long tradition of vernacular making. Today, necessary invention born of scarcity has given way (via the 1960s Blue Peter ethic of how many things can be made out of a squeezy bottle) to the economy of twenty-first century waste management. With skill and panache, Julie Arkell is an eloquent advocate for both thrift and recycling. She celebrates the
re-use of every last thread, scrap of wool and odd button to create objects that will amuse and delight for years to come. It has been a great pleasure to work with Julie Arkell on this exhibition. We are particularly grateful to Mary La TrobeBateman OBE and to Sara Roberts for their insightful essays on the artist. I must thank designer Lisa Rostron and photographer E!aine Duigenan. Thanks also to Polly Leonard, Editor of Selvedge magazine, for opening the exhibition at Ruthin at the beginning of its UK-wide tour, and for her introduction to this catalogue.
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In her introduction, Polly rightly laments the rarity in modern times of the haberdasher. Perhaps she, and Julie too, might enjoy a visit to Bunners. Bunners is an ironmonger in the old county town of Montgomery, and it seems to come from a bygone age. It has all the things that will ‘come in handy’; and that we ‘forgot existed’: traditional essentials that can be so difficult to find in contemporary retail spaces. There are indeed very few shops like this today and those that remain are mainly in small towns, which seems to imply that the traditions associated with such things are the preserve of smaller
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and rural communities. But urban charity shops and car-booting are part of the same continuum. Thrift is a truly modern phenomenon, like Julie Arkell’s work: rooted firmly in tradition and highly relevant to today. Philip Hughes Gallery Director, Ruthin Craft Centre
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Hanging farthingale frock
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introduction You’d be hard pressed to find a true haberdasher today. That kind of Aladdin’s cave of a shop – jam-packed with a myriad of ephemera that children find so appealing – just doesn’t exist anymore. Apart, perhaps, from some forgotten enclave in rural France. Department stores just don’t have the same atmosphere, they lack that combination of knowledgeable yet eccentric staff, and their stock of buttons is decidedly dismal – no cornucopia of colour, weight, texture, lustre, just half a dozen... If you lose a button today you are more likely to discard the cardigan than invest the time, energy and patience required to find a perfect match. Yet it is precisely this investment of care, attention and affection, so evident in Julie’s work, which strikes a chord and gives meaning to her universe. The sad undercurrent that ripples through her work is a lament and a reminder that these skills that we now find so charming in a gallery space were once found in every household. With her pastel palette Arkell’s work does employ sentiment and nostalgia as ingredients; yet it is so much more than mere kitsch or retro chic. Her recipe is spiked with some sharper sentiments.
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The work demonstrates an anxious awareness of the passage of time and displays a kind of nervous dedication to preserving each pretty memory. Her comfort creatures have an uneasy edge: part human, part animal, and above all eccentric and very English. Their individual personalities are imbued with the kind of raw emotion to which only children are privileged. They display the kind of vulnerability that is disguised behind sophistication as soon as self-awareness develops. Although Julie has been honing her deft technique and incubating these ideas for some years, it is only now that their spirit has caught a wave of the public’s imagination. The instinct to ‘stay home’ and ‘stay safe’ that is swamping contemporary visual culture in today’s climate of paranoia has collided with Julie Arkell’s vision and carried it into the public consciousness. Her home craft combination of ‘make do and mend’ marries the vocabularies of papier-mâché and textiles in a sophisticated union. This haberdasher of the emotions has truly come of age. Polly Leonard Editor, Selvedge magazine
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julie arkell If HOME is where the heart is, then Julie has named this exhibition aptly. In all her work there is a loving attention to detail, with each piece made with skills that are nurtured in the home. Julie’s home is at the end of a white stuccoed terrace in a wide, open street in North London. This is the house where her father and his sister, ‘Auntie Violet’, were brought up, and where Julie and her friend and partner Douglas now live and work. When Julie moved here the house was full of objects and full of memories. Every drawer contained scraps from the past, and many of these have found their way into Julie’s work. Propped on a landing is the doll, sleep now, clothed with Auntie Violet’s nightie, and many of the postcards she kept from foreign holidays have been sewn and worked on to become word pictures for the world that Julie creates. As a child Julie put on plays – performed around three Pelham puppets she was given, the Witch, Cinderella and the Old Lady – and her work continues this storytelling using the words and artefacts of childhood. These three characters describe three aspects of her personality and she remains true to expressing this complexity in her own characters. After studying fashion textiles at St Martin’s Julie decided that despite her love of clothes and fabrics she wanted the freedom to develop her own ideas in her own time. To begin with she stretched and handpainted silk, and with the scraps made accessories to sell on a craft stall in Covent Garden’s newly opened Saturday Market. Every Friday night she would paint her business cards to hand out during the day; by lunch-time they would all be gone. The business cards developed into greeting cards and took her for a while to work for a company in the USA.
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left Pick up twigs Winged creature
previous pages Care for and Pine Knitted shadows
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right The rest is silence... and hope Ragwort
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Although Julie had by now successfully achieved an income and a flat in Islington to live in she still wondered about the direction her work should take. The change came one day in the British Museum when she saw the large Grecian vases and realised that she wanted passionately to work with objects. As she felt that clay would take too long she started mixing flour and water with newspaper. The strength of papier-mâché allowed her quickly to make statue-like objects as well as small brooches, necklaces and other quirky ephemera and in 1985 she showed these at Philippa Powell’s Chelsea Crafts Fair, attracting buyers and collectors, many of whom knew her greeting cards. Her work evolved and she began to exhibit in galleries. The scale sometimes became larger and the range of objects more diverse. There were boats with wheels and sails; there were prams full of upright figures. They all seem similar to one’s own childhood toys and yet they are profoundly different. The figures are faintly disturbing although Julie’s work has never had the sinister, nightmarish element that Paula Rego explores in her paintings. Where Rego paints and draws from her dreams and nightmares, Arkell quietly constructs creatures that express hope, joy, sadness, doubt. Is this because the work is grounded in the hand-made, through the use of all the skills we traditionally learn at home: stitching, sticking, sewing, knitting? Julie’s work is usually based on papier-mâché, a technique that she uses with great dexterity and at lightning speed. When people look at craft objects often they don’t see the skill and judgement with which the technique is used. It is mesmerising to watch the way Julie pastes the paper and applies it with her hand to form objects and creatures – it creates a surface that evokes feelings of caring and nurturing. The paper comes from old books, often paperbacks that are collected from markets, jumble sales and local country bookshops. Her pieces are assembled from the world of collecting, of objects and things being ferreted away; from the treasures she finds in the nearby hardware store and haberdashery shop.
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The techniques are simple – her large studio table is divided into areas for papier-mâché, for sticking using a glue gun, for sewing and for painting. The studio walls are lined with divided shelves that Douglas has built, where she displays her finds and the things that people bring her. She leaves them out to look at, living with them for a while before the excitement of slowly combining the diverse elements to make a rabbit doll or a knit-head or a wooden family. As Julie makes them, their individual character and personality becomes apparent. Some of the rabbit dolls won’t come out of the cupboard, preferring to hide in the corner; the two with hats on seem to be locked shyly in conversation. The wooden family is my particular favourite. Made from parts of an old wood block building set, much of the original colour has been worn away. But the family – mother, father and baby – now have distinctive eyes and faces and a few knitted clothes fixed to the simple rectangular or square body shape. Their two toy animals – the lion and the rabbit – have tails as well as the distinguishing mane and long ears on their square block heads and as Julie shows me with a smile the heads can be swapped, “if you are really naughty”, like the children’s books where the head, the body and the feet can each be separately turned to create a strange figure. In contrast to the pristine and new, Julie’s work celebrates the patina of age and use and most particularly the marks that show care and attention. In a street in France this summer, Douglas spotted a short piece of red ribbon childishly embroidered with the word MAMAN. As Julie said, “all I wanted in the world was that piece of ribbon and Douglas had picked it up. I said, ‘if it is the only present you give me all year, then that is what I want it to be.’ ” Julie had instantly seen that it was an artefact that carried all the values she strives to celebrate and preserve in her work; the ribbon pieces came from that moment. She came home and ‘became obsessed with embroidering ribbon’.
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left Knitheads previous page The wooden block family
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right Almost overleaf Small rabbit dolls
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In the same way she has picked out old postcards with a few simple words or sentences hand-written on the back. She traces these few poignant words using the light of the window and embroiders them as part of a picture constructed around the card. Sometimes she also embroiders parts of the card to draw attention to a detail that has caught her eye. Then she pins them to the wall to live with them for a while. Julie has always had a fascination with words. She listens to the radio while she works and is acutely sensitive to words and short sentences. She notes them in her sketchbooks along with her drawings and paintings for ideas. She picks them out to name the creatures a lost sock, long yarn, slipping slightly. She embroidered the words of the poet, who when asked “Why write poetry?” said, “If I knew where it came from, I’d go there”. About her own work she describes how she makes things that she glimpses out of the corner of her eye. She tells how she makes things that she wants to see; how she realised that her reason for making things is “that otherwise they wouldn’t be there”. Julie is a person of quiet charm, dressed in the same colourful layers as some of the creatures she creates. She brings colour, fun and warmth into people’s lives through work that is quintessentially English, translating with an English eccentricity the world of seaside holidays, of the child’s nursery with its prams, toys and dolls-houses, into a world of her own. As she says, “I like capturing past moments, doing things that make me laugh.” This exhibition is a performance – a stage for the rabbit poets, the jar people, the knit-heads and many others. It is a glimpse of a world to ponder. Mary La Trobe-Bateman
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home What object is invested with more meaning, endowed with more love, than a child’s favourite soft toy – the one singled out from the rest to be companion and confidante, to be taken everywhere, hugged, worn, balded and holed, stuffing, limbs and shape lost, restuffed, reskinned, and embellished with additional features or garments? Julie Arkell is fascinated by the layering of age, use, meaning and emotion in such objects. She recalls a child she once saw in rural France with exactly this kind of toy, bound and rebound with layers of ribbons and rags until its original character was impossible to guess. That same day she found herself in a museum in Dijon filled with shelves of biological specimens preserved in traditional glass jars. She found the means of display as compelling as the objects: the straightforward presentation and the pragmatism with which holes had been made in the shelves to fit awkward objects, and even in the lid of a jar to accommodate a long snake. The combination of these two experiences inspired her to make a suite of stuffed, knitted and sewn characters in glass containers, a shelved collection of curiosities captioned by collaged and sewn text which gives only the barest clues to their identity and origin. They are presented like specimens, and what mysterious hybrid specimens they are: peculiarly evolved creatures sharing neither their proportions,
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left Jar creature, An Inkle... from the ancient world previous page Jar knit tops
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features nor even the number of their limbs. The arms of An Inkle (from the ancient world) unhook, but to what purpose is unknown; Ordinary Families has nothing ordinary about it at all, but plenty that is peculiar. The jar of Toad Flax is rather too short, so the lid has two holes to allow its rabbity ears to protrude, in the manner of the excess of snake in the museum. Stitch-back is a frog-like creature suspended upside down from inside the lid of its jar. Help is a fourlimbed creature with no facial characteristics aside from the word ‘help’ carefully embroidered upon its body, its ears or upper limbs protruding through the confines of its jam-jar lid. The most curious of all is Shy, a skinny creature whose tiny eyes are a male/female pair of sewn-on metal poppers; it is possible to click together its eyes to make it completely inward-looking, concealing its minimal features within a central crease. It is with these works that Julie Arkell seems to explore rawer emotion, to render from her huge vocabulary of materials, words and curious connotations, new creatures so vulnerable that they have to be protected and contained behind glass. They have been found a home.
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Home is the central theme of this exhibition, and significant amongst the preoccupations which were shaped by her 1950s childhood. Before our age of disposable household goods, cheap imported clothes and ready meals, home signified individual industry, when items to be worn or consumed were largely made on a domestic scale for personal consumption. It was the age of the haberdasher, the ironmonger and the woolshop. Julie’s mother was an exemplary homemaker, knitting Julie’s dad’s socks, baking biscuits, sewing clothes for herself, for Julie and for Julie’s dolls. Julie is unmoved by the Populuxe archetype of 1950s commercial culture, the tail-finned cars, the music and fashion; it is the texture, the sentiment, the minutiae of domestic endeavour of the period which continues to engage her. Asked about the influence of other artists, she is typically modest: she is not drawn to grand art, but to the quirky and personal: “I enjoy the intimate things made by other artists, such as the works which the sculptor Alexander Calder made for family and friends.” She likes the
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above Animals on wheels
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formal juxtaposition of objects by Giorgio Morandi, and the fact that he revisited and repainted the same groups of ordinary objects throughout his life. She is also deeply engaged by the enigmatic American author and illustrator Edward Gorey, whose books have the initial appearance of stories for children, but which on closer examination reveal an ominously black and adult humour. Gorey’s home, the Elephant House in Massachusetts, which has only been accessible to the public since his death in 2000, holds particular fascination for her, with its collections of found objects carefully formed into family groups: toys, stones, fragments, even stuffed toys made by Gorey himself.
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Julie Arkell is herself an inveterate collector of things. Her North London home is filled with collected ephemera, usually from bygone times: objects chosen for their colour, texture, humour, faded beauty or because they show the signs of hand making. It is a collection of buttons, badges, papers, cloths, ribbons, wools, books, dolls, toys, or tiny fragments of any of these things. It is presented in a display of order and sensitivity, in jars, drawers, shelves and boxes, such that it is easy to take it for a static display, lifelong, permanent. But Julie is not precious about her acquisitions; the collection is both inspiration and raw material for her practice: objects remain only until they are needed in one of her constructions. Julie’s artistic reputation has rested for decades on her making objects in papier-mâché which, before the recent ‘people creatures’, were highly decorative and brightly coloured. She works entirely with smallscale and traditional hand processes: papier-mâché, stitching, knitting (sometimes aided by her mother and her friend Beth), painting, embroidering, collage. “I like working with scraps: bits of fabric, wool and paper that have been worn, torn, used and read. Lists found between books, remnants of clothes, old buttons, discovered fastenings, hidden words, stories, lost feelings: put together again like secrets found on maps. I respond to the imperfection of things. Something frayed, faded, stained or coming undone has more meaning for me than an object perfectly put together.”
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above Box creatures
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She loves objects of emotional value, particularly those involving handiwork: a fragment of red ribbon found on the street in France, crudely embroidered with the word MAMAN; the carefully applied biro beard on the face of a chubbily innocent little girl in a children’s book; messages found on the back of second-hand postcards. By employing scraps of text and objects which already have an emotional history, Julie perpetuates their sentiment and gives them new life. In reclaiming the material she also reclaims the original emotional investment of their manufacture. The second-hand 1950s sock, for example, worn by Julie then turned into a duet of figures in a cart; a little stuffing and buttons for features animate them into creatures with an existence independent of their former function, but their original colours and patina evoke a real history. There is a close connection between the things she finds and the things she makes: she observes how vintage handmade clothes have been meticulously and lovingly constructed, and it is this kind of dedication and attention which she brings to the making of her own works. Julie even speaks about her works in emotional terms: “I am besotted with them”, “I loved making this”. She is driven to make things that she wants to see in existence. She creates a gentle, benign world, but is fascinated with sadness too. Her figures clearly have emotions yet they remain enigmatic. The majority of her works are figures which, even when displayed in family groups or brought together to travel in the same cart or boat construction, do not seem to have any means of communication with
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left Studio shelves ‘MAMAN’ above Sock carts
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above Postcard picture Framed writing
right Heidi grows up Pick up sticks
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each other. They are essentially solitary, lonely characters. They are the kind of creatures which get left behind, who don’t feel comfortable in their surroundings. They are quirky: some have human characteristics, some sport rabbit ears – or are those just rabbit-eared woolly hats? They are vulnerable in scale and proportion: they have large heads, broad childlike faces. Their expressions have the blank vulnerability of creatures with sewnbutton eyes, the pupils a mere stitch, the mouth an embroidered slit; or innocence, with sparely painted features: miniature lips and pinprick eyes; or they are sinister: photographic eye-nose-mouth combinations from glossy magazines incongruously collaged on to wooden-spoon faces. And she makes things which make her laugh, observing unusual juxtapositions, words taken out of context, references to the English Domestic, the culinary and the mundane: like the script meticulously recreated in stitch on one of her most memorable postcard hangings which reads, ‘In Pursuit of Jam.’ Sara Roberts
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Animals on stage
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Glimpse in drawer
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Farmyard shelf
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artist’s statement I have always loved to make things. Using accessible materials like paper, glue, wire, cardboard, wood, old fabric and wool, I am able to make pieces that express my feelings, thoughts and ideas, bringing past and present together. Letting myself be spontaneous is an essential part of creativity for me. I like to see what happens, what surfaces, rather than force my work in a particular way. Folk art, children’s work and toys are all sources of inspiration as I feel they have the spirit of being part of everyday life; being used and enjoyed for their sincerity and enthusiasm. Julie Arkell
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left Studio boxes above Julie Arkell in her garden
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biography right Tic-toc watches overleaf Chocolate box assortment
1955
Born in London
Training 1977–78 1974–77
BA Fashion Textiles, St Martin’s School of Art, London BA (Hons) Textiles, West Surrey College of Art & Design
1999
Crafts Council Index of Selected Makers
Selected exhibitions 2004 Home, The Gallery, Ruthin Craft Centre (solo, tour) Material Girl, Kath Libbert Jewellery, Saltaire Small collections of things, the jelly leg’d chicken arts gallery, Reading 2003–04 Tales of the Unexpected, Crafts Council Gallery Shop, London 2003 Recollection, City Art Gallery, Leeds Celebrating Education, Contemporary Applied Arts, London 2002 Julie Arkell & Susie Freeman, two person show, Contemporary Applied Arts, London 2001 Thirteen Hands, Caol Craft Project, Room 13, Caol Primary School, Scotland (tour) SPOONS: big and small, Lesley Craze Gallery, London 2000 Christmas Capers, Crafts Council Shop, V&A Museum, London Paper Art, Black Swan Gallery, Frome Christmas Exhibition, Flow Gallery, London Memories, Contemporary Applied Arts, London Last Orders, Crafts Council Gallery Shop, London 1999 Julie Arkell, Linda Miller, Lynn Muir, The City Gallery, Leicester All That Glisters, Agalma Gallery, Milan, Italy – organised by British Council (tour) 1998–2004 Künstlerisches Spielzeug, Galerie Handwerk, Munich, Germany 1997 Christmas Window, Contemporary Applied Arts, London 1995 Show of Hands, Show of Hands Gallery, Denver, USA 1995–2002 New York International Gift Fair, New York, USA Workshops 2004 The Workshop, Artist and Display, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA Great Ormond Street Hospital, London (CAA) 2002 Brecknock School children’s workshop (CAA) 2001–04 Marlborough College, summer school one-week workshops 1994–98 DALI, Central St Martin’s summer school 1997 Freetown, West Africa – one-week workshop organised by the British Council Barbican, London – children’s workshops
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acknowledgements right Sleep Tight (detail) overleaf Sleep Tight Sleep Might Sleep Now
Julie Arkell would like to thank everyone who has given her fabric, wool, dolls, clothes and buttons etc to help with her work over the years. Also the following for their support with this exhibition: Contemporary Applied Arts, especially Mary La Trobe-Bateman. Philip Hughes, Jane Gerrard and Ruthin Craft Centre. Elaine Duigenan and Stewart Keegan. Amanda Caines. The knitters: Jean Arkell, Mrs Phipps, Denise Washington, Josie Caines, Beth Morrison and Josie Firmin. Douglas Bevans for his endless encouragement. Ruthin Craft Centre would like to thank and acknowledge the assistance of the following: Mary La Trobe-Bateman OBE; Sara Roberts; Polly Leonard; Sonia Collins; the Arts Council of Wales and Nathalie Camus; Hafina Clwyd; Lisa Rostron; John Gillett; Elaine Duigenan; Dave Lewis; Roger Mansbridge; Pete Goodridge and ArtWorks. Julie Arkell: home is a Ruthin Craft Centre touring exhibition with support from the Arts Council of Wales. Ruthin Craft Centre Exhibition staff Philip Hughes and Jane Gerrard. Printed with vegetable based inks, on paper sourced from sustainable forests. This exhibition catalogue is also available in a Welsh Language Version.
Sara Roberts Sara Roberts is an independent exhibition curator and consultant. She recently curated 30/30 Vision: Creative Journeys in Contemporary Craft for the Crafts Council, and the touring exhibition Hand to Eye, revealing the processes of craft. She previously worked for PACA (Public Art Commissions Agency), The British Council and sates.org at The Winchester Gallery. Mary La Trobe-Bateman OBE Mary La Trobe-Bateman MDesRCA OBE is about to retire as director of Contemporary Applied Arts, the awardwinning gallery in central London which she has steered for the last ten years. She is a trustee of The Making, a selector for COLLECT at the V&A, sits on committees for The Goldmiths’ Company and the Crafts Council, and from January 2005 will be working as a freelance consultant and curator. Design: www.lawncreative.co.uk Photography: Elaine Duigenan Published by The Gallery, Ruthin Craft Centre. Text Š the authors and RCC 2004. ISBN 1 900941 78 3 The Gallery, Ruthin Craft Centre is part of Denbighshire County Council and is supported by the Arts Council of Wales. The Gallery Ruthin Craft Centre Park Road, Ruthin, Denbighshire, North Wales LL15 1BB Tel: 01824 704774
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Julie Arkell
Julie Arkell ISBN 1 900941 78 3