Jessie brennan on new show progress at the foundling museum exhibitions going out london evening sta by Jessie Brennan

12/30/2014

Jessie Brennan on new show Progress at the Foundling Museum - Exhibitions - Going Out - London Evening Standard

Tuesday 30 December 2014

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Jessie Brennan on new show Progress at the Foundling Museum

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Jessie Brennan has put her pencil skills to use to follow in the footsteps of William Hogarth and highlight a contemporary inequality — it’s housing that is the great social issue of our time, she tells Ben Luke

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Making progress: Jessie Brennan in Poplar's Robin Hood Gardens, which she took pictures of, printed onto A4 pages, scrunched up and then drew, above, as her response to Hogarth's A Rake's Progress

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Published: 03 June 2014 Updated: 11:30, 03 June 2014

BEN LUKE

Artist Jessie Brennan's studio is in the kind of industrial backwater that used to cover whole swathes of the East End but have grown fewer and further between with the area's regeneration. She lives around the corner from it and being immersed in an area with a fastdisappearing history has made a huge impression on her. So much so that it’s the subject of her latest project involving meticulous pencil drawings inspired by interaction with places and communities, infused with social history and storytelling.

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Her social themes, as well as her skilled draughtsmanship, makes Brennan an ideal choice to take on a new commission to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Foundling Museum near King’s Cross and the 250th anniversary of the death of one of its founding governors, William Hogarth. The museum houses the collection of the nowdefunct hospital of the same name, set up in the 18th century to care for

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Jessie Brennan on new show Progress at the Foundling Museum - Exhibitions - Going Out - London Evening Standard Christmas and New Year 2014/2015

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vulnerable children. Its paintings and objects movingly tell the story of the hospital and children who lived there. Its paintings are remarkable: Hogarth donated numerous works and encouraged his artist peers to follow suit. This week, to mark the two anniversaries, the Foundling opens an exhibition, Progress, based on Hogarth’s greatest work, A Rake’s Progress, the eternally relevant story of Tom Rakewell, who inherits his father’s fortune and descends into vice, ruin and ultimately madness.

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The show features an original 1735 series of Hogarth’s prints alongside contemporary responses to them by David Hockney (196163), Yinka Shonibare (1998) and Grayson Perry (2012), and Brennan’s new commission. At the age of 32, she’s joining a distinguished lineage. When we meet in the small studio, where I can see Brennan’s postcards of Hogarth’s series above the desk, as well as lots of drawings and other ephemera relating to the project. She talks animatedly and confidently, impassioned by her art and its themes, but was understandably daunted by the prospect of responding to this great work. “I did feel a bit overwhelmed,” she says. “I remember being really inspired when I saw The Rake’s Progress and David Hockney’s response, particularly, when I was in secondary school. So to then think, so many years on… well, you don’t think you’re going to ever be in this position. But it’s come about.”

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Cut and paste: JessieBrennan fivemetrelong drawing The Cut, one of a series of stilllife everyday objects onto which she introduces miniature vignettes

Brennan was born in Plymouth but says it was formative to her outlook today that, while her father studied for an MA at Brighton, she lived on campus there.

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“I grew up with families from Zimbabwe and Hungary, and it was really incredible, because, to be honest, if I had grown up in Devon, it was all white middle class.”

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Jessie Brennan on new show Progress at the Foundling Museum - Exhibitions - Going Out - London Evening Standard

Indeed, she now seems to thrive in culturally diverse, urban communities, making her an ideal candidate for a 21stcentury take on society of the kind Hogarth made so long ago. She wanted to avoid “a central protagonist in the role of the rake”, so the downfall captured in her sequence of four drawings is that of a housing estate — Robin Hood Gardens, Alison and Peter Smithson’s brutalist blocks in Poplar, built in 1972 and scheduled for demolition next year.

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Brennan took photographs of the buildings and printed them out on everyday pages of A4, which she then scrunched up. The finished drawings capture progressive degrees of crumpledness, with the building appearing almost intact in the first image, and collapsed in the last. “I chose the best visual experiments from a ridiculous number of crumpled bits of paper — it was like a giant wastepaper bin in here at one point,” she laughs. “The imminent demolition is visualised: it’s fairly simple in visual terms and I like that, it’s quite striking, and yet it raises complex issues about the politics of urban living.” The series reflects London’s housing crisis and is “a criticism of social policy and this sense that perhaps Robin Hood Gardens is what remains of community housing — it’s being absorbed into an ideological system of growth, driven by capital and profit”, she says.

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She quotes figures from the Fairness Commission for Tower Hamlets. “Twenty per cent of households in Tower Hamlets earn £15,000 or less per year. Households; not per person.” She might have added that the same commission has also said that 48.6 per cent of children in the borough — 27,915 children — live in poverty, the highest rate in the UK. “So I just think, wow, considering that, regeneration schemes like the one replacing Robin Hood Gardens aren’t really going to benefit that many of those people — in fact, maybe none of

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Jessie Brennan on new show Progress at the Foundling Museum - Exhibitions - Going Out - London Evening Standard

them. At the moment it’s predominantly social housing but it will fall to 35 per cent. That’s where it gets kind of crazy.” Brennan’s drawings also reflect the failure of the Smithsons’ noble ambitions in creating the estate. “There’s a utopian promise there — their ‘streets in the sky’. They wanted mothers to be able to pass through with enough room for a milk cart to get by — incredibly romantic,” she says. “That was their whole point, I think. They wanted to create something in architecture that was more human. And I suppose that many people couldn’t quite understand how you’d get that from something so austere — brutalism, concrete slabs.” Is she, like architects Zaha Hadid and Richard Rogers, an admirer of the estate? She admits that when she first visited it, when she began living with her artist partner George Charman in the Fire Station, a dedicated livework studio building just off the approach to the Blackwall tunnel in E14, “it was winter time and I remember going, ‘This is horrible, this is too much’. But then I went again in the summer and thought, ‘This is great’. There was green everywhere. And since I’ve been doing this project, I have definitely grown to like it.” But her feelings about the building are irrelevant, she says. “It’s about looking first at the broader angle of it all… and how social housing is being as easily crumpled as I’ve been crumpling bits of paper.”

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Inspiring: Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress

Brennan’s other works in London communities have included two Art on the Underground projects, creating drawings based on her discussions with local people and Tube staff at Southwark and Edgware Road. And in 2011, she created a fivemetrelong drawing, The Cut, based on an oral history of the Lea Navigation Canal in Hackney Wick. Shortlisted for that year’s Jerwood Drawing Prize, it was based on the piles of everyday stuff found on narrowboat rooftops. Closer up, though, you could see miniature vignettes described in the interviews for the project: boxers, fishermen, a greyhound race, a horse on the towpath, people on their allotments. “It was about creating this kind of island that references the canal in a formal way, and also in the content,” she explains, “but the smaller narratives shift the scale and things that are objects become more architectural.” Brennan baulks at the idea that her skilful drawing might be regarded as an antidote to the conceptualism that dominates much of today’s art world. “It’s the craft element — I understand that. But why can’t there be that kind of content as well as the craft?” she asks. “I love conceptual art,” she continues, adding that American conceptualism pioneer John Baldessari is among her favourite artists. Indeed, she is also a video artist, though it’s bound up with her drawing: in 43 Strangers, she went to Brick Lane and invited strangers to draw her as she sketched them, filming their faces as she did so. It was about “the intimacy of drawing a person who you don’t know — it’s what you do with a lover,” she says, “just staring into that person’s face.” Do her drawing skills help when she meets the communities that inform her projects? “Maybe it’s a way in at first,” she says, “but if the technique is too strong or competent, they’re just going to become nice drawings,” she says, with a mock scream. “I need to maintain

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Jessie Brennan on new show Progress at the Foundling Museum - Exhibitions - Going Out - London Evening Standard

the grittiness, that’s what I want to do.” And what could be more gritty than the demolition of tonnes of brutalist concrete? Progress is at the Foundling Museum, WC1 (020 7841 3600, foundlingmuseum.org.uk) from Friday until September 7 ES Partners; Click here to view great offers on London exhibitions at Amazon Local

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