Thanks for the Apples by falmouthartgall

THANKS FOR THE APPLES

THANKS FOR THE APPLES Falmouth Art Gallery

In spring 2019 Naomi Frears and Ben Sanderson invited eight nationally and internationally acclaimed artists to come to Cornwall. In the autumn they hosted the artists in a house on a cliff and together they toured the county in a minibus, visiting museums and exploring their collections and archives. From the thousands of artefacts they saw during the week, both on display as well as behind the scenes, the artists each chose objects they were drawn to. From a hairball found inside a bull to a row of whimsy bottles and a tiny calendar, these artists focus our attention on objects and artworks that, while not hidden, can be overlooked, asking questions about the nature of these artefacts and what they might mean to us now. Thanks for the Apples has been devised and produced by Naomi Frears and Ben Sanderson. This project would not have been possible without the support and enthusiasm of Donna Williams at Falmouth Art Gallery. Thank you to all participating museums for their generous support through visits and loans. They are: Bodmin Keep, Falmouth Art Gallery, Museum of Cornish Life, Penlee House Gallery & Museum, Perranzabuloe Museum, PK Porthcurno, Royal Cornwall Museum, and Wheal Martyn. Thanks to all the artists involved and to Theo Inglis for poster and publication design. The title Thanks for the Apples is taken from a painting by Romi Behrens (1939-2019) (an artist admired by both Ben and Naomi).

Yemi Awosile

Dod Procter RA (1890–1972) Self Portrait Oil on canvas Selected by Yemi Awosile from Penlee House Museum & Gallery

I am always thinking about the relationship between the process of making and the end result so I selected a collection of Crysede block printed fabrics with archive images of the production process. Block printing is a process that I am very drawn to, mostly because of the rhythmic movement involved in creating the fabric designs, as well as the process of making the actual printing blocks fashioned from wood. My work is made from several smaller pieces which have been lightly patch-worked together. The various pieces are connected but held together with a very loose and fragile bond. For this piece I reinterpreted aspects of prints which I have either seen or collected from West Africa and Asia, but I also incorporated pops of colour which reminded me of the Cornish Crysede prints. I used a combination of stitch and print to give it more of a tactile quality. I’m interested in the different ways of representing different locations around the world in cloth, from the origin of the fabric to the raw materials used to create the tools.

In the portrait the artist is wearing a Crysede Scarf. – Crysede Silk Scarves and Textile Fragments Selected by Yemi Awosile from Penlee House Museum & Gallery 8

Nicolas Deshayes I was drawn to these objects because they were at once seductive and grotesque. They look like medical specimens in vitrines, diseased pieces of flesh or warty skin but also foodstuff behind glazed counters – candied sweets, burnt pizza, boiled gammon, crystallised honey – stones that I wanted to suck on. Inspired by this desire to taste, I made a series of reliefs in sorbet coloured expanding foam that I vacuum-formed behind sheets of transparent plastic. Formed under heat the plastic shrink-wrapped itself over the contours of the forms, emulating the packaging of patisserie and charcuterie. I framed these pieces in machined aluminium to give the works the functional aesthetic of a commercial kitchen or butcher shop.

Hematite and Aragonite Samples Selected by Nicolas Deshayes from the Royal Cornwall Museum 12

Naomi Frears This scrapbook, made by a religious postmaster from Perranporth, contains pithy rules for life, prayers for local fishermen, and despair at the morals of ‘the great and high born’. Every page is a collage of everything he was thinking and hoping for. I am always drawn to text but it’s the idea, for me, that he was making an image as much as a text that I love. In the scrapbook I see a mind overflowing but I also see beauty, rhythm and pattern – an unintentional modernist at work. In Parts, I focus on small slices of colour and extract just a few of his words from the thousands that surround them. In Pocket Eye, different thoughts gently collide and overlap - a tiny digital scrapbook. Gnatty was filmed in my garden and the little park down the road. It too is a collage of my thinking, incorporating a message from somewhere far away with descriptions of half-finished works in my studio. The more I watched them, the more these little dancing insects felt like the moving pattern of ideas inside an unquiet mind – a mind like mine and maybe like that of Mr William Henry Tremewan.

William Henry Tremewan Scrapbook (1852–1979) Selected by Naomi Frears from Perranzabuloe Museum 16

Kira Freije I was interested in the time and place of the making of the whimsy bottles. Were they carved and stuffed at sea or when sailors were back on dry land? Or a combination of both — being the conduit between a sailor’s dual life of sea and of land. The bottle is both throwaway and portal-like as a vessel. A container for carvings as scenes, miniatures, surreal landscapes. There is a reverence in these works where the human body and its relationship to water emerges; the body is water, at the mercy of it, living from it. Made within glass walls in order to be seen, these works are offerings, there is magic and trickery within them as well as a sense of devotion. The objects have a personality that transcended into figures and spirits. Those out on the boats and those on the shore. Connectivity and signalling. Lighthouses. Solitude. Signals missed. Imagined flickers. Tricks of light. Absence and hope.

Whimsy Bottles Selected by Kira Freije from the Museum of Cornish Life, Helston and Penlee House Museum & Gallery 20

Georgia Gendall

Sir John Arnesby Brown RA (1866–1955) A Summer Day – Study for A June Day, 1913 Oil on canvas Selected by Georgia Gendall from Falmouth Art Gallery 24

I made a shortlist of 3 objects I was drawn to. A very big rake from the Museum of Cornish Life but I couldn’t use that because it was so big they couldn’t get it out of the museum, a small biscuit with a photo mounted in it from Bodmin Keep; the biscuit was preserved from World War One and using it as a photo frame was how a solider kept a photo of his family safe, and a painting of some cows by Sir John Arnesby Brown. Poo (in particular cow poo) at the time was important to me; I was making cow pat door stops and would always go out of my way to step in a pat on a walk. So, I couldn’t not pick the painting of the cows. I thought I wanted to do something with cow poo, I drew maps of cows and their cyclical relationship to the land. However, I was working the lambing season in the spring of 2021 and I spent a lot of time with my hand inside the ewes and with their insides landing on my outsides. Visceral seems an obvious word but it was deeply visceral. These profound and intimate experiences with sheep changed how I connected with all animals; knowing their inner warmth made me think of bodies differently and when I turned my focus back to the cows again, I was able to see beyond the poo and see their bodies as a whole. Sir John Arnesby Brown’s painting of the cows (A Summer Day) is a moment within a landscape we recognise so well; nostalgic and epically comforting; it captures the mundanity of a cow’s life relatively well, but I find it devoid of the senses. The work I needed to make had to be covered in their inner warmth.

Ben Sanderson While looking at clocks in the Museum of Cornish Life I came across this small paper calendar. At first glance I didn’t know what it was, but I was drawn to how neatly it was divided into segments and it’s curling edges. I tried to read it but struggled. The geometry made me think about formality and structure while the way the ink has bled over time and the rusty stains started to make me think about painting. When I realised it was a calendar that sat within a clock that sat within the pocket of a naturalist, my mind started looping uncontrollably. The multiple constructs of time held in this object made me want to create something that was both old and new. The years and months turn into minutes and seconds and for a moment everything feels still while the seasons spiral in continuous bloom.

Calendar made by C. A. Johns the naturalist 1831–1843 Selected by Ben Sanderson from the Museum of Cornish Life 28

Katie Schwab

Farmer’s Smock, 1830s Embroidered linen Selected by Katie Schwab from Perranzabuloe Museum – Occupational Therapy Pack – Art-Needle by Penelope Selected by Katie Schwab from the Museum of Cornish Life, Helston A pack containing a linen tablecloth, instructions and 31 silks, purposely made for occupational therapy classes for serving members of HM Forces in the Second World War.

I have chosen three objects from different stages of a textile design process; a sketchbook of designs for Millhouse Fabrics, Penzance; a ‘Penelope Needlework Pack’ of silk threads and linen, and a 19th century hand-stitched ‘farmer’s smock’. Together, these objects offer ways to think about notions of labour, strength and recuperation. The improvised embroidery Work Hands 10 takes as its starting points the sketched patterns produced for Millhouse Fabrics in the 1950s, and the ‘Penelope Needlework Pack’, which would have been used for Forces Occupational Therapy sessions during WWII. Work Hands 10 was stitched over nine months during the lockdowns of 2020. strength study 2 is informed by the ‘farmer’s smock’, a white stitched linen garment traditionally worn as a protective layer while labouring. This work is made from bias binding, a material that is often used to strengthen and reinforce other fabrics. Stitched together, the bias binding forms a sturdy architectural textile that is itself reinforced and able to hold itself up.

– Mill House Fabric Sketchbooks Selected by Katie Schwab from Penlee House Gallery & Museum 32

Daniel Sinsel

Stone Found in a Ling Selected by Daniel Sinsel from Penlee House Museum & Gallery – Hairballs Found in the Carcass of a Bullock

I was drawn to a pebble and a hairball because they were small and tactile. They instantly made me curious about their story. The pebble, without a narrative, seemed rather unspectacular, dull even. There was something abject about the hairball. It turned out they were both extracted from a digestive tract. The pebble was found inside a fish, the hairball inside a bull. The pebble would have caused a reasonable amount of distress. In the case of the animal hairball, I imagined it being a result of stress as in “tearing its own hair out”. The bull was likely eating its own fur because of lack of the right kind of food. I immediately thought of art. I often think that for me good art attracts me like the stone and hairball did. It has to do with its potential to have narratives attached to it. Oh, and making art can often enough feel like coughing up a hairball or giving birth to a stone. I wanted to paint a fish. I like the faces of flat fish. They look naturally in distress. I wanted to pay homage to the fish who ingested the stone. (I took a lot of artistic liberty because the original fish was a Ling) I wanted the fish to become the stone. I often think of painting like that: A curious alchemistic process where material is alluded to by means of illusionistic trickery while being its own material of ground up coloured stone and oil.

Organic materials Selected by Daniel Sinsel from the Museum of Cornish Life, Helston 36

Caragh Thuring

Unknown Artist, 19th Century The Killigrew Monument (The Pyramid, Arwenack) Oil on canvas Selected by Caragh Thuring from Falmouth Art Gallery – Photographs of St Michael’s Mount, Shipwrecks, and Paintings of Shipwrecks Billboard prints Selected by Caragh Thuring from Falmouth Art Gallery, Penlee House Gallery & Museum and Royal Cornwall Museum 40

Shipwrecks are a prominent feature of the local coastline and a brilliant example of the tussle between manmade vessels and intentions and the natural weather and rocks, some of which are volcanic. The images are probably rarely seen, I wanted to unearth them and make a display that evoked the power of the landscape. The Killigrew Monument remains mysterious and relates to drawings and references I make to bricks and pyramids in my work, which I refer to as ‘Pyramid Volcanoes’. The monument also reminds me of the clay and mining heaps. I saw the Shipwreck photographs and images as similar to my fascination with Volcanoes. A constantly shifting entity that can result in disaster. All the volcanoes in my painting are of newly occurring eruptions in 2020, one an underwater volcano exploding from the surface of the sea. The drawings of the volcanoes are separated on individual patches of coloured gesso on a woven image of a huge lava flow. Each shipwreck image is also displayed as an individual entity on the wall. For me, bricks are the perfect object to describe a collaboration of the manmade and the natural. Taken from the earth they are used to build a structure. The Killigrew monument, bricks, shipwrecks, rocks and the volcanoes seem inextricably related.

Marie Toseland

‘No Bathing’ Sign Selected by Marie Toseland from Perranzabuloe Museum – Men’s Gown Sewing Pattern

The objects I chose may all seem quite different, but I was interested in their shared intimate relationship to both bodies and water. The Denby hot water bottle and “Danger” sign function as some kind of barrier between the two – material or demand. The sewing pattern was something which could be made up, using a replica pattern, into something which signals a change of state – removing the robe in order to bathe. At the start of the project, I wanted to create new relationships between the objects I had chosen, such as by linking the Denby hot water bottle and sewing pattern through the material I chose to make the dressing gown – curtains designed by Tibor Reich (who designed for Denby in the 1950s). In the context of the pandemic, the idea of barriers took on new significance, and I wanted to explore ways to overcome the ‘barrier’ between bodies and water in terms of the closure of swimming pools. I was reflecting on the ways in which some people were responding to restriction – re-imagining and repurposing things they had at hand – in order to make equivalencies.

Selected by Marie Toseland from the Museum of Cornish Life, Helston – Denby Hot Water Bottle, detailed B.E.D. Ceramic Selected by Marie Toseland from the Museum of Cornish Life, Helston 44

List of Works Yemi Awosile

Kira Freije

omo 2021 Block printed linen embroidered with silk and polyester thread

Crossing 2021 Stainless steel, mouth blown glass, LED lamp

Nicolas Deshayes

Sighting 2021 Stainless steel, mouth blown glass, LED lamp

Pilgrim’s Orchard 2021 Ordnance Sorbet (I) 2021 Chez Deshayes 2021 Ordnance Sorbet (II) 2021 Vacuum-formed expanding foam, aluminium

Naomi Frears Pocket Eye 2021 Video (Duration 1 min 16 s)

Searching signals, but the turbulent winds, the distant smoke 2021 Stainless steel, cast aluminium, copper, galvanised steel, mouth blown glass, parchment, LED lamp Siblings 2021 Stainless steel, cast aluminium, copper, brass, aluminium, glass bottle, parchment

Gnatty 2021 Video (Duration 3 min 42 s)

Georgia Gendall

These are Confusing Times 2021 Video (Duration 1 min 30 s)

Salt Licks 2021 Himalayan salt licked by cows

Parts 1-3 2021 Monoprints on Somerset 330g 1/1

Argal Home Farm, Mabe Herd size: 7 cows Penventon Farm, Helston Herd size: 400 cows

Trudnoe Farm, Mullion Herd size: 300 cows Tregevis Farm, Martin Herd size: 220 cows Boswidjack, Constantine Herd size: 400 Cows Leyonne Farm, Fowey Herd size: 450 cows Wheal Clifford, United Downs Herd size: 13 cows, Trekillick Farm, Bodmin Herd size: 300 cows

Ben Sanderson 10:08 2021 15:42 2021 17:34 2021 21:40 2021 Ink, acrylic, watercolour, dye, monotype, oil on canvas

Katie Schwab Strength study 2 2021 Cotton bias binding, polyester thread

Daniel Sinsel Untitled 2021 Oil on canvas

Caragh Thuring Eruptions of 2020 2021 Gesso, gouache and graphite on woven linen, cotton Strata 2021 Woven linen and cotton

Marie Toseland McCall’s 4816 2021 Used curtains, cotton thread Men’s bathrobe. The fabric was purchased as secondhand curtains which were homemade using ‘Gainsborough’ fabric. ‘Gainsborough’ was designed by Tibor Reich, who also design ceramics for Denby Pottery. Bathrobe made to sewing pattern ‘McCall’s’

Work Hands 10 2020/21 Cotton thread, cotton mesh

‘No Bathing’ Suit 2021 Digitally printed lycra, lining fabric, swimsuit elastic, polyester thread 55.98 2021 Digitized Hi8 tape (Duration 2 min 31s)

Thanks for the Apples 27th November 2021– 22nd January 2022 Falmouth Art Gallery: The Moor, Falmouth TR11 2RT Exhibition devised and produced by Naomi Frears & Ben Sanderson Book Design: Theo Inglis Exhibition Photographs: Steve Tanner Printed by Booths: The Praze, Penryn TR10 8AA

Yemi Awosile Nicolas Deshayes Naomi Frears Kira Freije Georgia Gendall Ben Sanderson Katie Schwab Daniel Sinsel Caragh Thuring Marie Toseland Falmouth Art Gallery