4 minute read
SPOTLIGHT
Photography
CHILD’S PLAY Esther May Campbell’s CV makes everyone else’s look a bit halfhearted. Now based in Bristol, she’s a BAFTA-winning fi lmmaker, TV director and writer – and an extraordinarily talented photographer.
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Her latest project, Scrapbook, is a citywide photographic exhibition and book born from a collaboration with children attending the weekly photo club at St Paul’s Adventure Playground. Over the course of a year, Esther and the children explored the way that the spirit of play can evolve into an inspiration for living, capturing the risks and joys of throwing yourself into the world of discovery and imagination.
“Scrapbook is a testament to the infi nite qualities of mucking around,” says Esther. “It’s a portal into the telling world of child’s play, upside-downing, risk, creation, kinship, destruction, art, and story, as the world keeps on spinning.”
More in our next issue; in the meantime look out for the photos displayed on billboards across the city, until 21 September.
Scrapbook costs £20; all profi ts from the book will go to the ongoing work at St Paul’s Adventure Playground. Buy a copy at apeproject.enthuse.com
Community
LIGHTBULB MOMENT Remember this? The Cheers Drive sign that made us all smile at last year’s Bristol Light Festival has now been installed permanently at Marlborough Street bus station, as a gesture of thanks to the key workers. The festival plans to return in February 2021, and we’re all invited to vote for the next Bristol phrase to be illuminated.
It has to be Proper Job, surely? Get nominating at Twitter, tagging @bristol_light bristollightfestival.org
Art
GARRET FASHION Although Bristol professes a connection to quite a few dead literary giants, the majority of the claims verge on the tenuous. Thomas Chatterton, on the other hand, was our boy through and through.
Born in 1752 in a house opposite St Mary Redcliff e, Thomas was a dreamy, precocious child. Fascinated by the mediaeval manuscripts he found in the church, he began to write his own verses under the alias of an imaginary 15th-century monk. Call them hommage, call them fakes; either way, the poems of ‘Thomas Rowley’ managed to fool the literati of the day .
Hoping to further his career, Chatterton set off for London in 1970. Success eluded him, and at the age of 17 he took a fatal dose of arsenic in his garret room. Accident or suicide? Either way, within a few years he’d become the poster boy for the new Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite movements; a symbol of suicide, tragic youth and neglected genius. Wordsworth called him “the marvellous boy”; Keats, the “dear child of sorrow”.
Although Chatterton is now regarded as the fi rst Romantic, few people could quote a line of his work today. Is it time to reclaim the boy poet’s reputation? A good place to start might be at RWA, who are marking the 250th anniversary of his death by showing Henry Wallis’s Chatterton; a painting that caused a sensation when it was fi rst exhibited in 1856 and still has the power to shock. Accompanying the exhibition is A Poetic City, a programme that aims to highlight Chatterton’s links to the city.
Fun fact: the model the artists used for Chatterton was the young George Meredith, himself a well-known novelist and poet. Two years later, Meredith’s wife ran off with Wallis; but that’s another story. Furious, Wild and Young: The Death of Chatterton shows at RWA between 7-18 October 2020. On loan from Tate Britain. More info at rwa.org.uk
Yet more art
WELCOME TO THE PLEASURE DOME Few artists have done more for Bristol’s visual pleasure than artist Luke Jerram, whose new work, Palm Temple, is now on permanent display outside Bristol Uni’s Chemistry Department.
Originally commissioned for the 600th anniversary of the dome of Florence Cathedral, Luke’s spiralling dome is cut in half; the two halves are placed in parallel, like palms of a hand coming together in contemplation of nature. Suspended in the dome, an Extinction Bell tolls 150-200 times a day to indicate the number of species lost worldwide every 24 hours.
Visitors can walk through the artwork, enjoying the shifting light and spectacular refl ections in the mirrored fl oor as it refl ects the dome above. Instagram, you will be unamazed to hear, has gone absolutely nuts for it. lukejerram.com
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